by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Scientocracy Rules

Welcome to the Scientocracy, where unless you fully accede to the consensus view, then your opinion not only doesn't matter, it might even be dangerous. On this episode of ID the Future Casey Luskin shows how a recent move to redefine scientific literacy from an understanding of science into wholesale capitulation to the "consensus" damages true scientific literacy - including the right to debate and dissent.

Go here to listen.

Luskin's article appeared in Salvo Magazine's Winter 2009 issue. For more information on Salvo, go here.

Well, all I can say is, first, I write the Deprogram column for that mag (not usually on line), and second, that the mag is one of the few that is not dedicated to simply fronting an establishment consensus about Darwinism.

2. Okay, also,

Why Consensus Doesn't Count

Darwinists often point out that Darwin's theory is supported by a majority of scientists and so only the evidence that supports the theory should be presented to students. On this episode of ID The Future, CSC's John West explains that when it comes to setting public policy, dissenting views on science can be critically important and should be encouraged.

Go here to listen.

Basically, consensus is for herding sheep. When you want to hear evidence for the value of consensus, always ask a sheep.

3. Plus

200 Years After Darwin -- What Didn't Darwin Know?

This special video episode of ID the Future celebrates Darwin Day with a look back at the man and his theory by three scientists and scholars who join in the scientific dissent from evolution.

Biologist Jonathan Wells, author and M.D. Geoffrey Simmons, and molecular biologist Douglas Axe shed light on the problems with Darwin's theory as they share what led each of them to their skepticism.

Jonathan Wells first became skeptical of Darwin's mechanism of natural selection, but it was in his studies in embryology that he became skeptical of common ancestry. Dr. Wells takes a historical look at the impact of Darwin's theory and discusses how unnecessary it is for modern science.

Geoffrey Simmons, M.D., explains how he became a Darwin skeptic after looking at the evidence and finding the evidence for evolution lacking.

[From Denyse: It's not - in my view - that evolution doesn't happen - but that the evidence usually accepted is so poor.]

And molecular biologist Douglas Axe from Biologic Institute explains the problems genetic mutations pose for Darwin's theory.

Listen in to their stories and appreciate again the scientific evidence against Darwin's theory.

Well, of course. Go here to listen.

It's far easier to think of evidence against the Darwin nonsense than to explain its hold on the public. Oh, wait ... Darwinism is both tax-supported and a get-out-of-jail free card. (Like, it's not you who did it, it is your selfish genes and/or your ancestral ape heritage.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

"Of all whale species, by far the noisiest, chattiest, most exuberant, and most imaginative is the humpback. It is the noisemaker and the Caruso of the deep, now grating like an old hinge, now as melodious as an operatic tenor" (1). These were the words of the late oceanographer Jacques Cousteau in his epic volume Whales, originally written in French under the more descriptive title La Planete Des Baleines. The male humpback in particular had been a source of fascination for Cousteau's exploration team precisely because of its exquisite song-making capabilities. Star Trek aficionados will no doubt remember the long-range distress calls of these ocean-faring giants in the movie blockbuster The Voyage Home.

Humpbacks can be heard for hundreds or even thousands of kilometers creating discernible noise sequences or 'themes' that can last as long as 20-30 hours (1,2). The available repertoire of vocalizations requires that "bursts of air" be channeled up from the lungs and through the trachea (3). The frequency range of these vocalizations is formidable- 8-4000 Hz (compared to 80-1300 Hz for a singing human; (4)). While certain sounds might serve to maintain contact between distant herds (2) others are clearly used to attract mates in the shallow breeding grounds of the tropics (5).

The sperm whale's characteristic clicking has likewise been intensely studied and marine biologists have in the last decade described this creature's 'pneumatic sound generator' in great detail (6). Usual clicks serve for echo location while so-called 'coda' clicks are used for maintaining the "complex social structure in female groups" (6). Remarkably the amount of air used to make each click is so small that even at depths of 2000 m, where the air volume is significantly reduced, sperm whales can phonate successfully (6). The mechanism of sound generation is exquisitely selective for the two modes of communication: "the marked differences between coda clicks and usual clicks are caused by differential sound propagation in the nasal complex" (6).

Other whale species are known to 'talk to each other': blue whales, fin whales, rights and bowheads all display the use of what has tentatively been called a rudimentary language (7). Equally captivating is the auditory apparatus that picks up these sounds (8). Unlike terrestrial mammals, whales sport freely-vibrating ossicles in the middle ear for more sensitive distance hearing:

"The bones of the middle ear, although fused to each other, are not directly connected to the rest of the skull; they are suspended from it by means of ligaments. All around them is a complex network of cavities and sinuses filled with a foamy mucus that further insulates the ear from the skull and provides yet another means by which whales filter out all but the essential sounds."(9)

What are we to make of the evolutionary origins of these key designs? In the summer of 2009 a seminal publication in the journal Mammalian Biology provided fodder for one popular idea (10). Using the aquatic escape behavior of Bornean mouse deer as primary evidence for their claims, researchers from Indonesia and the Australian National University in Canberra proposed that whales might have descended from ancient members of the ruminant family tragulidae which today includes cattle, sheep, goats and deer (11). Local villagers have observed tragulids submerging themselves in rivers and streams for over five minutes at a time as a way of eschewing would-be predators (10).

The Australian-Indonesian publication came hot on the heels of a cladistic study that claimed to have found a whale 'sister group' called Indohyus - "a middle Eocene raoellid artiodactyl from Kashmir, India" (10, 12). The overarching conclusion of this earlier work was nothing short of profound:

"Our analysis identifies raoellids as the sister group to cetaceans and bridges the morphological divide that separated early cetaceans from artiodacyls." (12)

We might therefore reasonably expect that the hearing and vocalization of modern cetaceans could be drawn into a gradual evolutionary sequence, perhaps going as far back as the land-sea transitioning mammals from which they are supposed to have been derived. But like so many evolutionary just-so stories, the devil is in the details. Indeed Darwinists admit that significant differences in the morphology of sensory organs make cetaceans unique (12).

In 2004 a group headed by professor of anatomy Hans Thewissen published what appeared to be the definitive answer on the evolution of whale hearing (13). Their 'integrated interpretation of evolving sound transmission mechanisms' came as a result of fossils that were collected from 35-50 million year-old deposits (13). The base specimen of their cladistic interpretation, a 50 million year old fossil of a terrestrial mammal called pakicetus, benefited from bone conduction of sound through a loosely suspended tympanic bone (13). Later aquatic mammals such as remingtoncetus and protocetus possessed large so-called mandibular fat pads that further improved bone-mediated sound transmission (13). For all three phyletic groups a terrestrial auditory structure called the external meatus allowed efficient capture of airborne sounds (13). Thewissen's final chronological group, the basilosauroids, sported yet one further innovation- air-filled sinuses that acoustically isolated the ear from the rest of the skull (13).

The most striking omission in the above sequence, and perhaps the most important of all, is the explanation for how a fleeting mouse deer somehow adapted to the acoustic rigors of underwater living. A five minute escapade in the shallows of a river is a far cry from the mate searches that would have been so vital for an aquatic lifestyle. Pakicetus was in fact a fast-running, land-dwelling long-necked quadruped (more like a dog than a deer) that lacked any sort of sub-aquatic anatomy (14, 15). Indeed one alternative interpretation of the data is that the pakicetus middle ear structure was more consistent with what one might expect for a subterranean habitat in which the head is in direct contact with the ground (14).

While Remingtoncetus was undoubtedly a four-legged semi-aquatic mammal that had a long slender snout, small eyes and ears and an overall size perhaps no bigger than a sea otter (16, 17), the above descriptive of the origins of its auditory innovations fits more in line with what one might expect for, say, a saltationist view of life than any sort of gradual evolutionary process. The same can be said of the supposed transition from protocetus to basilosauroids. In fact the fossil evidence reveals that in remingtoncetus the foundations of the modern whale underwater auditory mechanism had already been realized (13). Ironically the most convincing set of ear transitional forms in the whale evolutionist's armory- that of the decrease in size of the semicircular canal system of the inner ear (involved in balance) - only shows evolution bringing about small changes to already existing functional innovations (15).

Hippopotamids are of course hot favorites for the title of the closest living terrestrial relatives of whales (18, 19). Like whales, modern hippos are furnished with bone-mediated hearing and exhibit effective underwater communication (18). Still, morphology-based phylogenies to-date have yielded conflicting results and the identification of intermediates that supposedly spanned the divide between hippos and the common ancestor is controversial (20). Different analyses show anywhere between 3 and 40 million years of unrecorded evolution depending on which sister groups one chooses to grab along the way (20).

Over a decade ago one high school biology textbook asserted that there were no clear transitional fossils linking land mammals to whales (21). Such a position has been upheld by the most recent peer-reviewed literature. In fact hypotheses on the evolution of sound generation in whales and delphinids hinge upon the selective "drivers" that purportedly brought about change (eg: hunting, increased sociality, predator avoidance) while leaving out the mechanistic details of how such change took place (22, 23, 24). In contrast, the co-integrated nature of whale sound transmission, both in its vocalization and capture, has led some to the inference that intelligent rather than mindless design is at play. As one review noted:

"The anatomical structure, biological function, and way of life of whales are so distinctly different from those of terrestrial mammals that they cannot possibly have evolved from the latter by small genetic changes; aquatics require the simultaneous presence of all their complex features to survive. Perfect acoustical and other constructions are required for their serenades and way of life in the vastness of the ocean; they could only exist from a detailed preliminary plan. Employing sounds to allure their mates has another interesting feature, considering the entirety of the animal kingdom. Although each species emits sound signals that resemble signals of other species, the animals never mistake the sounds for those of other species...Harmony between sounds and sound-receiving organs likewise presupposes the...requirement of simultaneous appearance, while excluding the possibility of gradual evolution." (8)

In short, the latest evidence on whale communication cuts deep into the fishing nets of evolutionary dogma. Darwinist trawlers have every reason to be concerned.

Literature Cited
1.Jacques Cousteau and Yves Paccalet (1986) Whales, W.H. Allen & Co, London, pp. 236-38.

2.Eduardo Mercado III (1998) Humpback Whale BioAcoustics: From Form To Function, PhD thesis, University of Hawaii, http://www.acsu.buffalo.edu/~emiii/diss.pdf p.16.

3. Ibid p.25.

4. Ibid p.37.

5. Planet Earth Series: Shallow Seas, Narrated by David Attenborough, BBC Video, 2008.

6. P. T. Madsen, R. Payne, N. U. Kristiansen, M. Wahlberg, I. Kerr and B. Mohl (2002) Sperm whale sound production studied with ultrasound time/depth-recording tags, The Journal of Experimental Biology, Vol 205, 1899-1906.

7. Jacques Cousteau and Yves Paccalet (1986) Whales, W.H. Allen & Co, London, p.234.

8. Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi (2009) Nature's IQ: Extraordinary Animal Behaviors That Defy Evolution, Torchlight Publishing, Badger, CA, pp.102-104.

9. Jacques Cousteau and Yves Paccalet (1986) Whales, W.H. Allen & Co, London, p.161.

10. Erik Meijaarda, Umilaela, GehandeSilva Wijeyeratne (2009), Aquatic escape behaviour in mouse-deer provides insight into tragulid evolution, Mammalian Biology, doi:10.1016/j.mambio.2009.05.007

11. Matt Walker (2009) Aquatic Deer And Ancient Whales, BBC Earth News, 7th July, 2009, See http://news.bbc.co.uk/earth/hi/earth_news/newsid_8137000/8137922.stm

12. J. G. M. Thewissen, Lisa Noelle Cooper, Mark T. Clementz, Sunil Bajpai & B. N. Tiwari (2007) Whales originated from aquatic artiodactyls in the Eocene epoch of India, Nature, Vol 450, pp.1190-1194.

13. Sirpa Nummela, J. G. M. Thewissen, Sunil Bajpai, S. Taseer Hussain, Kishor Kumar (2004) Eocene evolution of whale hearing, Nature, Vol 430, pp.776-778.

14. J. G. M. Thewissen, E. M. Williams, L. J. Roe & S. T. Hussain (2001) Skeletons of terrestrial cetaceans and the relationship of whales to artiodactyls, Nature, Vol 413, pp.277-281.

15. F. Spoor, S. Bajpai, S. T. Hussain, K. Kumar & J. G. M. Thewissen (2001) Vestibular evidence for the evolution of aquatic behaviour in early cetaceans, Nature, Vol 417, pp.163-166.

16. Remingtoncetidiae, See http://www.neoucom.edu/DEPTS/ANAT/Remi.html

17. Sunil Bajpai and J. G. M. Thewissen (2000) A new, diminutive Eocene whale from Kachchh (Gujarat, India) and its implications for locomotor evolution of cetaceans, Current Science, Vol 79, pp.1478-1482, See http://tejas.serc.iisc.ernet.in/currsci/nov252000/1478.pdf

18. The Animal Communication Project, See http://acp.eugraph.com/elephetc/hippo.html

19. Whale and hippo 'close cousins' BBC News, Monday, 24 January, 2005, See http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/science/nature/4204021.stm

20. Jean-Renaud Boisserie, Fabrice Lihoreau, and Michel Brunet (2005) The position of Hippopotamidae within Cetartiodactyla, Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci, Vol 102, pp.1537-1541.

21. Percival Davis, Dean H Kenyon, Charles Thaxton (1993) Of Pandas And People: The Central Question Of Biological Origins, Haughton Publishing Company, Richardson, Texas.

22. Laura J May-Collado, Ingi Agnarsson, Douglas Wartzok (2007) Phylogenetic review of tonal sound production in whales in relation to sociality, BMC Evolutionary Biology 2007, Vol 7, p.136, See http://www.biomedcentral.com/content/pdf/1471-2148-7-136.pdf

23. Migrating Squid Drove Evolution Of Sonar In Whales And Dolphins, Researchers Argue
http://migration.wordpress.com/2007/09/15/squid-migration-drives-whale-sonar-evolution/

24. Morisaka T, Connor RC (2007) Predation by killer whales (Orcinus orca) and the evolution of whistle loss and narrow-band high frequency clicks in odontocetes, Journal Of Evolutionary Biology, Volume 20, pp.1439-58.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Go here for my first column ("Some claim that Satan is a great motivator, just like God"). Sure, especially if you think you could save money by having hellfire heat your house.

and here for my second, ("Faked embryos back at PBS, December 29, 2009.")

No really. The fudged embryos are back. As a "learning tool," in total ignorance of the development hourglass. The "hourglass" just means that embryos look different when very young, similar later, and different again when older. That says nothing about common descent, one way or the other (that is just the trouble, right?)

Embryos, like cakes, dresses, and renovations, look different at different stages.

I think common descent is probably true in most cases, but we cannot necessarily use embryos to prove it.

I wonder how long this Examiner thing will last? I registered at Beliefnet on the advice of a friend, but they deleted my profile. And my query about the matter has received no response.

Shrug. I like Examiner better anyway.

Anyway, read it there while you can.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, a correspondent was advising me that business is about Darwinian competition.

Naturally, my mind wandered to self-described Darwinian capitalist Conrad Black, who did not fare too well in the United States's justice system. Admittedly, Canadian journalists were inclined to give him a bad rap because of his habit of suing journalists, so I will not make him an issue.

Anyway, as a long-time business teacher for people in media, I replied as follows:

This much I know is true, so let me restate it:

Darwinism is worthless as an explanation of how prosperous economies operate, though clever analogies can be drawn to "evolution, speciation, extinction, mutation, survival of the fittest" by people with the time, inclination, and contracts for books destined for the airport kiosk.

Reality check: Darwinism is - to use Edward Banfield's book title as a phrase - "the moral basis of a backward society."

In a state of practical Darwinism, families, clans, and tribes form tight little groups with little interest in the public welfare. They distribute public assets among themselves. So public assets are minimal and poorly maintained, as far as the general public is concerned. For example, money is stolen at the Post Office, but "no one" is responsible for the theft. It's untraceable.

Here is an example: When I used to write for a road building association trade mag, I heard about a contractor who had lost a brand new bulldozer. He went on a vacation in a far away country, and guess what - he saw his own 'dozer at work on a site - and they hadn't even bothered to unscrew the Canadian licence plate! That's how he knew for sure it was his. No one cared that the 'dozer was stolen goods. He assumed, rightly or wrongly*, that it would be useless to contact the police there.

*I would think that any foot patrol officer might wonder why that service vehicle bore a Canuck licence plate. Couldn't the owner be dinged for not getting a local plate?

No wonder such a country is "less developed." They are never going to get anywhere unless they give up practical Darwinism, and adopt codes of business ethics that owe nothing to Darwinism.

Why? Because few investors want to front large, complex businesses in such places. One never knows when the power or water will be off, due to corruption and incompetence - leaving a firm's technical staff with an unscheduled but paid vacation.

The fundamental basis of prosperous societies is co-operation, not competition. The power is on, the water is clean, the roads are maintained, your business taxes go to something other than graft, the police target criminals (not dissidents), girls are in school (not in brothels), and if you smash up on the highway, a paramedic ambulance will arrive promptly to pick up whatever remains of you and try to snuff it back to life. That owes nothing to Darwinism, and everything to co-operation between large groups of individuals in the public interest - which helps the private interest as well, and thus promotes prosperity.

As far as I am concerned, as a business owner and business teacher, you can take Darwinism and blow it out the window. It is not what builds up a good environment for business.

Yes, of course there is competition in a favourable environment for business. But it is the favourable environment that makes competition viable. Practical Darwinism (= everyone out only for his own pack or herd) breaks down the needed environment for prosperity.

Golly, I hope someone listens.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Tom Heneghan advises, “As Darwin Year ends, some seek to go ‘beyond Darwin,’” (Reuters Faith World: Religion and Ethics, December 14, 2009).

So I was intrigued by a conference held at UNESCO here in Paris recently about scientists who believe in evolution but want to go "beyond Darwin." Organised by French philosopher of science Jean Staune, its speakers argued that Darwin could not explain underlying order and patterns found in nature. "We have to differentiate between evolution and Darwinism," said Jean Staune, author of the new book Au-dela de Darwin (Beyond Darwin). "Of course there is adaptation. But like physics and chemistry, biology is also subject to its own laws."

Well, say it in French or in English, but just say it out loud: "le darwinisme, c’est incroyable;" “Darwinism is unbelievable."

Still, here is the story in a nutshell: Once a person claims to me that the chimp in the zoo is 99% identical to one of my grandkids, I know I am dealing with an unbelievable belief. Just how to deal with it is a difficult question, especially if the belief is government-funded and supported by all the right people (who don't think I should have grandkids anyway).

Michael Denton, a geneticist with New Zealand's University of Otago, said Darwinian "functionalists" believed life forms simply adapted to the outside world while his "structuralist" view also saw an internal logic driving this evolution down certain paths. His view, which he called "extraordinarily foreign to modern biology," explained why many animals developed "camera eyes" like human ones and why proteins, one of the building blocks of life, fold into structures unchanged for three billion years.

Here's more from Denton:

Q: What do you think of "intelligent design" now?

I have some sympathy with the intelligent design movement. I can see their point. But in the end, I think natural self-organising matter plus natural selection can probably explain it. I don't like the attitude of the Darwinian establishment towards intelligent designers because one thing the Darwinist establishment certainly can't explain is the origin of life. That's for sure. Probably special creation is better than what they've got. That's almost like confessing a murder, I know, but I don't mind being quoted on that. Because I personally see so much fitness in the cosmos for the ends of life, then that it is at least compatible with a design hypothesis like Aristotle or Aquinas. I'm quite irritated by the way the Darwinists claim they have all the answers. I don't think they can explain the fitness of the universe for life. They can't explain the origin of life. So I think they should be a little bit more humble.

Well, Michael Denton has himself been going beyond Darwin a long time. He has been described as a post-Darwinian, and his views have been vindicated by evidence. His book Nature’s Destiny is a long explanation of why he doesn’t believe the garbage fronted - by law - to publicly funded schools in places where you, gentle readers, probably pay taxes. Merry Christmas - no, not to you, serfs, but to your Darwinist masters, whom you support.

Many of us doubt that Denton's self-organizing matter can explain the origin of information. That's like thinking the Scrabble pieces can organize themselves in such a way that when you scatter the pieces they form a perfect, intelligible message. Friends have suggested that Denton read Polanyi and Yockey. Otherwise, he is stuck with "the mother gives birth to herself."

But I recommend Denton anyway because he understand marsupial mammals, and many North American pundits do not. We have only one: the Virginia opossum. I have never seen an opossum in the Toronto area; they are not well furred and apt to suffer from frostbite.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In a review in First Things by David B. Hart, of Richard Dawkins's The Greatest Show on Earth, we are informed - on the mag's cover - that Dawkins "gets a gold star" for his book of that name (January 2010 Number 199).

Indeed, he does get the gold star from reviewer Hart. Hart is full of praise for Dawkins, though daintily demurs at his hardline atheism. But he is a total, unwavering convert to the greatest scam ever conceived in the history of biology, that Darwinism - a conservative aspect of wild nature that trims out life forms unsuited to an ecology - actually has vast creative powers.

I can't yet seem to find the review on line, but that was not for lack of trying.

Now the contest: Here's what Hart has to say about design in nature:

The best argument against ID theory, when all is said and done, is that it rests on a premise - "irreducible complexity" - that may seem compelling at the purely intuitive level but that can never logically be demonstrated. At the end of the day, it is - as Francis Collins rightly remarks - an argument from personal incredulity. While it is true that very suggestive metaphysical arguments can be drawn from the reality of form, the intelligibility of the universe, consciousness, the laws of physics, or (most importantly) ontological contingency, the mere biological complexity of this or that organism can never amount to an irrefutable proof of anything other than the incalculable complexity of that organism's phylogenic antecedents.

For a free copy of Expelled, can you spot the mistakes in the quoted passage above? I mean, actual mistakes, as opposed to "He isn't making any sense." There is enough of the former, but you will find plenty of the latter too, I am afraid.

Here are the contest rules. Most important: No more than 400 words.

Also: If you won a previous contest quite recently and your prize is late, it is most likely because our post office here has four days off at this time of year, and I can't do a thing about that. If you won a long time ago and never got your prize, write me at oleary@sympatico.ca

Go here to enter. You must register to comment, but it is painless WordPress stuff.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here is her interview with David H. Koch, a Darwin-thumping multi-millionaire who has done much to front the cult to the public ("Evolution Sea Change?: David H. Koch Weighs In ," Archaeology Today, February 17, 2009). Mazur made headlines last year when she wrote about the Altenberg 16, scientists who met in Austria to plan a way of understanding evolution that was free of tax-funded Darwin worship. Anyway, among other things, we learn:

Next year, the David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins opens at the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History, where evidence of 6 million years of human evolution will be part of an interactive display that includes the Laetoli footprints and a reconstruction of Lucy. Visitors will be able to pass through a time tunnel to view early humans "floating in and out of focus," touch models of ancient human fossils as well as watch their own faces morph into those of extinct species. The Smithsonian display follows the creation of the American Museum of Natural History's David H. Koch Dinosaur Wing.

Rendering of proposed "Human Characteristics" display at the Smithsonian's David H. Koch Hall of Human Origins, now in development. (Courtesy David Koch)
Richard Potts, director of the Smithsonian's Human Origins Program, explained about the new exhibition, "David's commitment to science and the study of human evolution will enable the Smithsonian to bring the latest discoveries in this field to the broadest audiences. The exhibition, still in the planning stages, encourages the public to explore the lengthy process of change in human characteristics over time. It also presents one of the new research themes in this field--the dramatic changes in environment that set the stage for human evolution. Although the subject can be controversial, the unearthed discoveries that bear on the question of human origins are a source of deep interest and significance for everyone to contemplate."

David Koch is Executive Vice President of $110 billion Koch Industries (he owns 42%) and CEO of its subsidiary, Koch Chemical Technology Group. He is often described as Manhattan's wealthiest resident, and contributes to Lincoln Center, Sloan Kettering Cancer Center, and the fertility clinic at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, to name a few. He is also is the principal private funder of PBS's Nova series.

It gets better when she begins to challenge him:

Suzan Mazur: As a man committed to the principles and practices of freedom, including scientific freedom, and as a scientist yourself with degrees from MIT in chemical engineering - is it your perspective that we are now witnessing a sea change in evolutionary thinking? That even as the global celebration begins for Charles Darwin's 200th birthday, the man who brought us the theory of evolution by natural selection 150 years ago--Darwinian selection, or survival of the fittest, is now being viewed by serious evolutionary scientists as not enough to explain our existence?

To quote from my interview several months ago with NASA astrobiologist Chris Mckay, who was featured in the recent Nova Mars documentary you helped underwrite: "Something had to precede Darwinian natural selection. The Darwinian paradigm breaks down in two obvious ways. First, and most clear, Darwinian selection cannot be responsible for the origin of life. Second, there is some thought that Darwinian selection cannot fully explain the rise of complexity at the molecular level." So the question is: Is it your perspective that we are now witnessing a sea change in evolutionary thinking?

David Koch: No. I don't think it's a sea change. The sea change occurred back when Darwin published his evolutionary theories, backed up by massive, overwhelming evidence. What's happened since is that there's been a rather steady progressive acceptance of the concepts of evolution in the general public. It's amazing to me that in America a large faction of the population still doesn't believe in it.

Suzan Mazur: But the point is that Darwin started with life. He addressed what happens once you have life. He didn't address the origin of life. That's what Chris McKay, the NASA astrobiologist is saying.

And so it goes, until she gets him to admit that he does not know what he is talking about.

Well, we must give the guy marks for honesty. The average third-rate biology prof is just content to emit Darwin noises and know as little as possible about real challenges.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: Mathematician Jeffrey Shallit weighs in

Signature in the Cell: Darwinist demands to rewrite product copy

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This controversy erupted over estimates of war deaths since World War 2 (1939-1945):

Researchers from Canada, the UK and Sweden have slammed the influential British Medical Journal (BMJ) for publishing an error-filled study on global war deaths, refusing an equivalent rebuttal article and having a flawed peer-review process.

Apparently, the contested article took issue with the fact that Oslo's International Peace Research Institute data show that global war deaths "declined by more than 90 per cent between 1946 and 2002."

"This is not some trivial academic disagreement," says Andrew Mack, director of the Simon Fraser University-based Human Security Report Project (HSRP), which p published a detailed critique of the BMJ's claims in the December issue of the Journal of Conflict Resolution (JCR).

"Accurate statistics on the health impacts of war are critically important not just for researchers but also for humanitarian organizations whose assistance programs save millions of lives around the world."

The BMJ doesn't deny the problem:

"But the BMJ is well aware that its peer review process is flawed," says Spagat. "A recent study, whose authors include the journal's current editor, revealed that, on average, only a third of the 'major errors' deliberately inserted in a BMJ article were picked up by reviewers."

In what other line of work would such incompetence be accepted? Would you like your electrician to achieve only this level of competence? He only "gets" one third of the electrical safety hazards in your home?

And remember, if you live in the UK, your taxes pay for these scholars to "do their thing."

Adds Mack: "There appears to be no way of effectively rebutting BMJ articles that contain unwarranted -- and damaging -- critiques of the work of other scholars.

A couple of years back, I wrote on the problem of peer review: Often, it is simply the way establishment hacks prevent competition from new information and new interpretations.

Re war deaths, two notes:

- It would hardly be surprising if deaths in battle declined steeply, post World War II, because battlefield medicine has greatly improved. Indeed, it was improving during the war itself (1939-1945), and some sources credit the Allies' victory in part to discovery of penicillin, which restored personnel who might otherwise have been disabled or dead. Plasma, anti-malarials, and other drugs also received a huge boost due to the War.

- Modern warfare increasingly targets civilians. It could be 9-11. Or 7-11. Or it could be someone's granny, shopping at a Halal meat market in Iraq, to prepare a family celebration. When the conflict is between a trained terrorist and your granny, you should expect lw "battlefield" casualties. That is not a battlefield, after all; it is a monstrous crime scene.

- Still, it ought to be possible to maintain another point of view, with solid references. That's one thing peer review should enable, but it is increasingly obvious that peer reviewers do not want to bother.

Anyway, the intelligent design controversy is hardly the only area where peer review can merely maintain a convenient consensus - or tweak beards in a politically correct way.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

1. What makes Darwinism politically correct?

This episode of ID the Future features Robert Crowther interviewing CSC senior fellow Dr. Jonathan Wells on his book, The Politically Incorrect Guide to Darwinism and Intelligent Design. Dr. Wells explains the peer-pressure involved with Darwin's theory and shares from his studies in 19th century Darwinian controversies and evolutionary development at Yale and UC Berkeley, respectively.

Listen here.

The book's Web site is here.

In my view, Darwinism is politically correct because it is a tax-funded racket parasitizing real science. It attracts the sort of people who like free form speculation about the tyrannosaur's parenting skills, Neanderthal man's sex life and why homo sapiens (modern man) believes in God (not because some had an encounter with God, of course; such an idea could never be entertained).

2. The Design of Life: What the Evidence of Biological Systems Reveals

On this episode of ID the Future, Casey Luskin discusses The Design of Life: Discovering Signs of Intelligence in Biological Systems with author Dr. William Dembski. Is design in nature just an "illusion," as Richard Dawkins proclaims? Dembski and co-author Dr. Jonathan Wells show the answer is "no." Biologists have and continue to use the assumption of design successfully, precisely because design in biology is not an illusion but real.

Listen here. Design is not an illusion, but then neither is the cushy position that current society grants to people who claim it is. Almost any other position, no matter how ridiculous, can be fronted (space aliens, multiple universes ... and I suspect that is only a start.)

3. How to teach responsibly without getting sued?

This episode of ID the Future features Casey Luskin interviewed by Kevin Wirth on the key legal cases involving teachers teaching evolution. What does the case law say about teachers' rights and free speech?

Luskin, a lawyer with a science background, published a survey of case law in Hamline University Law Review to help the public understand what the courts have ruled on the topic of teaching origins.

This survey of twenty-one cases investigates the question many teacher, parents, and students ask: what is legal when it comes to teaching evolution? Can public schools teach scientific critiques of evolution? What does Discovery Institute recommend for teaching in schools? Find out by downloading the survey of case law here.

Listen here.

Two reasons I realized years ago that the legacy mainstream media are gone cats are

a) the inability of the average reporter to get certain basic facts straight, for example:

Doubts about Darwin do not turn on the age of the Earth, but on implausible claims about the origin of high levels of information - you know, the jumbo jet slowly materializes from the scrap heap, with no intelligent input at all ... And so does the trilobite and the tyrannosaur, and man. And that Alfa Romeo you always wanted (but you had to buy a minivan when your wife had twins)? Yeah, really.

b) passive, gullible acceptance of completely stupid claims about human psychology, whose only purpose is to prop up Darwinism.

As I wrote to some friends recently:

I have said this many times, but indulge me while I say it again: The "big bazooms" theory of human evolution - taken seriously by Psychology Today as the biggest truth - is a classic in the field.

Allegedly, men prefer well-endowed women so that their selfish genes can determine whether the woman is fertile.

Oh? So it has nothing to do with the reasons many men prefer big steaks, big mugs of beer, SUVs vs. Golf Minis, bagging a moose vs. bagging a prairie chicken?

Who knew? Who could ever have guessed?

As I have pointed out elsewhere, animals show similar preferences to people.

Wolf packs prefer bringing down a caribou or a beefalo to bringing down a deer. The deer is as much trouble to chase, but doesn't give anywhere near the number of servings.

So if we want to talk about the evolution of the preference for abundance vs. non-abundance, we must go way, way back into mammal or vertebrate evolution. No need to spend a lot of time with Old Stone Age Man.

The only reason for the Darwinist's Old Stone Age Man schtick is to find a question that "evolutionary" psychology can supposedly answer in a materialist way.

I have yet to see it perform better than psychology in real time.

Yet sponsored Darwinist nonsense is everywhere now, and it corrupts both thinking and behaviour.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here we read,

The idea was to correlate findings from his family's brain scans with a parallel analysis of genes thought to be associated with aggression and violence. Changing activity in certain parts of the brain relates to aggression, emotion and the inhibition of impulsiveness. Dr. Fallon's previous research on murderers had suggested that many killers show distinctive patterns in these brain areas.

"There's gonna be bad news, but I don't know where it will pop up," Dr. Fallon said in September, before he had seen the family data.

- Gautam Naik, "What's on Jim Fallon's Mind? A Family Secret That Has Been Murder to Figure Out: Nature Plays a Prank on a Scientist Looking for Traits of a Killer in His Clan", Wall Street Journal, November 30, 2009

Whatever happened to a fundamental rule of medicine that you do not practice on family members – with or without a license?

Naik decently points out what many miss:

The idea of the "born criminal" has a long history and is deeply controversial. Drawing conclusions about the biology of psychopathic murderers is especially hard because data are scarce. Those in jail rarely agree to a genetic or brain analysis. As a result, scientists rely a good deal on inference. While many people can be aggressive, violent and impulsive, only a tiny fraction become psychopathic killers, capable of committing bone-chilling crimes without empathy, remorse or a sense of right and wrong. Dr. Fallon says his research and other findings suggest that psychopathic killers often have lower intelligence than most people, which can be the result of brain damage.

Dr. Fallon and other scientists increasingly believe that violent offenders emerge when three factors are combined: several "violent" genes; damage to certain brain areas; and exposure to extreme trauma and poor parental bonding in childhood. In other words, nature and nurture.

Notice how personal choice has dropped out of the picture.

I don't know about any of this stuff:

"'violent'" genes? Most people want to live and thrive, however misguided their approach. Whether violent crime results depends on where and how they live, what they expect from life, and how it squares with legal and social codes.

"damage to certain brain areas"? Well, that is unlikely to be inherited, but bad memories of brain damaged adults, passed down as stories, may well be a cultural inheritance.

"exposure to extreme trauma and poor parental bonding in childhood"? Sure, but for every person I have met who shipwrecked on the shoals of life on these accounts, I have met at least six who decided, "I will not live the way I learned."

Anyway, in my experience, the dictum that one should not practise on family members is a sound one.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neurosurgery: Does "slice n' dice" cut it, when mental disorders are in question?

Neuroscience and popular culture: How much are science journalists to blame for pop science culture?

Psychology: Think positively - or peel potatoes!

Pop Neuroscience and spirituality: "Dear God, please don't exist, so I can get lucrative assignments, and maybe tenure, teaching easily digested " rot ...

Denyse O'Leary is co-author of The Spiritual Brain.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Go here for the contest and here for the results.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The question was,

For a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD, about the unique position of Earth, provide the clearest answer to this second question: Is backwards or forwards time travel really possible, even for particles? Why or why not? What are the consequences if it is true?

Go here for the contest and here for the results.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The question was,

For a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD, about the unique position of Earth, provide the clearest answer the following question: Nine billion dollars and 15 years later, what is the Large Hadron Collider likely to tell us that is worth the cost and trouble?

Go here for the contest and here for the results.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, evolutionary biologists/psychologists (if there is any difference, I would be glad to know*) are trying to get jobs adding to the cost burden of medical schools, fronting their speculations to doctors in training, a friend advises. See this story by Daniel Cressey ("Groups say med school training must evolve," Nature Medicine 15, 1338 (2009) doi:10.1038/nm1209-1338a, paywall, of course):

Medical training must adapt to include coursework covering evolutionary biology, according to a group of leading researchers.Momentum for such change seems to be building.

I bet. In an age of skepticism about all the nonsense evolutionary biologists front, they need to attach themselves to a system that people are still willing to fund.

"The case for ensuring that physicians and medical researchers are able to use evolutionary biology just as fully as other basic sciences is compelling," says Randolph Nesse, of the University of Michigan, lead author of the paper. "The constraints that inhibit change are severe, however. Most medical schools do not have a single evolutionary biologist on the faculty."

Nesse's paper cites examples of where evolutionary knowledge can benefit those working in medicine. An awareness of why humans have evolved the fever response, for example, could help doctors understand when it is safe to use drugs to block fever.

Rubbish. Pharmaceutical studies on living patients in real time do that. No one proposes to give the drugs to Old Stone Age Man, but rather to a toddler, an overworked near-retirement executive, or a frail older senior. The latter two would not even have been alive in the Old Stone Age.

As I have written to friends,

... Joe Roofer shows up in the family doctor's office griping about his arthritis.

Who cares if Stone Age man had arthritis? Joe Roofer is paying, one way or another, for what helps him now. He must get back to work and supervise his men ...

Sure, speculations about Old Stone Age Man are interesting.

But "interesting" doesn't cut it in medicine - and I have plenty of relatives in medicine who can tell me so.

What works for Joe Roofer today cuts it. So Joe can hop back on a ladder, supervise his men, please his clients, and meet his payroll Friday.

Medicine is real time. So what use is Darwinism when we are dealing with people over 60 years of age - a lifespan rarely attained in practice in ancient times, and irrelevant to natural selection?

Bioethics is the major concern now because most people who need significant medical care are old.

Oldsters take longer to heal than youngsters but if they stick it out, they often live many more years than expected, under modern conditions. But they are on pension, so ...

This story owes nothing to Darwinism and no Darwinist was abused in making it. But anyone who cannot see where all this is going is half asleep, in my view. Remember eugenics? We are now seeing it at the back end, rather than the front end.

One friend noted in response to my mug-waving, "Two words. Downright ridiculous." Someone she knows is in medical school and is busy enough without learning atheist culture's creation myth.

*Actually, I suspect there isn't really any difference between evolutionary biology and "evolutionary psychology", which is why the evolutionary biologist is forever linked to his idiot siamese twin, the "evolutionary psychologist" (= "Why women love shopping," "Why men are big spenders," etc.)

If evolutionary biologists wanted to denounce the nonsense, they could sever the skin tie, but then they'd be expected to address the nonsense they front themselves. How many months has it been since the "Ida" fossil rolled through pop culture?

Don't tell me science is "self-correcting." Ida shouldn't have got anywhere near the traction it did. In this area, science is about as self-correcting as a driverless car heading off a cliff.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Coffee!! Marxists celebrate Darwin, denounce design - and line up all afternoon for sausages, unless they are Party members, in which case ...

Intelligent design and elite culture: These are the people who invented silk stockings for men, so what should I
expect?

This is not a coffee moment: Canadian columnist advocates worldwide one-child policy - fast back to the Stone Age

More coffee!! Your doctor needs to know what would have worked for someone's hypothetical reconstruction of Stone Age man before she can treat you effectively ...

Coffee!!: Should we reject Darwinism due to its obvious support for new atheism?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

(Note: Go here for Contest 16 ("Are materialist atheists smarter than other types of believers?") and here for Contest 17 ("Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion?"). )

We have, we are told, three brains - reptilian, mammalian, and primate. Here is a conventional science explanation, and here is the pop psychology that results.

It all sounds bit too neat to me, for two reasons: First, all the areas are interconnected, and second, it is not clear that reptiles uniformly fail emotionally compared to many mammals. See here, for example.

Honestly, it all sounds like pop psychology, straight from the airport paperback kiosk to the bored passenger. But I would be glad to know more. Here is a popularrendition of "reptile brain" theory, as employed by some lawyers in law courts.

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007), which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, answer this question: If so, how? If not, why not? What can it really tell us?

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 18 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Also, here are some posts at The Mindful Hack that may be of some use or interest:

Reptile brain: Even reptiles don't have one, or not exactly, anyway

Rooks in captivity show more feats using tools. [How come some birds are so smart and others are fairly stupid?]

Great majority of neuroscientists on wrong track?

Is your brain full of anachronistic junk?

Reptilian brain a barrier to investment?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Well, it certainly sounds like debunking to me. According to the evolutionary psychologists, either compassion is a useful gene or it somehow spreads our selfish genes or it is an accidental "spandrel" in our makeup. Or whatever. It's not a choice, and it's not identification with another human being derived from the independent reality of a mind thinking today. Humans do it the way ants might do something else.

Evolutionary psychologists never feel the need to debunk rage or deceit, for example, so why compassion?

Here, I reference Robert ("Non-Zero") Wright's effort to explain the evolution of compassion. See also Clive Hayden here and Steve Pinker here.

Darwinists and materialists in general keep scratching this itch. Why? What is the threat? Also, how convincing are their claims that society will be better off if we accept their version?

So, for a free copy of The Spiritual Brain: a neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Mario Beauregard and Denyse O'Leary, Harper One 2007): Why do evolutionary psychologists need to debunk compassion? What's in it for them?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 17 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

(Note: For the record, compassion is not necessarily a virtue. The social worker who inappropriately identifies with an abusive mom, as opposed to the child she is employed by the government to protect, is showing misdirected compassion that can end in the child's death. Compassion must be allied with reason and virtue in order to count as reasonable or virtuous.)

Notes on compassion that may be of interest:

Psychology: Compassion is an emotion, not a virtue unless disciplined, prof says

The philosopher and his mother, a moral tale

Entrepreneur doctor honours promise

Desperate atheist rage

Is the altruism spot edging out the God spot in pop science?

The power of one: Compassion is strictly a one-to-one thing

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At any rate, so claimed a 1986 study about which Regis Nicoll writes here.

I say "smarter than other types of believers" because atheism is a form of belief like any other. Usually, in North America today, materialist atheism is meant. There are non-materialist varieties of atheism, but they are not usually strident, like the new (materialist) atheists.

Interestingly, materialist atheism tends to develop structures similar to other religious institutions (the latest is summer camps for kids). It all reminds me of Julian Huxley's 1959 proposal for a religion of evolution - but that for another day.

So, for a free copy of the The Spiritual Brain, which argues for non-materialist neuroscience, provide the best answer to this question: Are materialist atheists really smarter than other people? By what measure would we know? What difference does social privilege - such as tenure at a tax-funded institution and general acceptance in popular media make in determining who is smart?

Here are the contest rules. Four hundred words or less. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Here's Uncommon Descent Contest Question 16 at the site, so go there to enter in the Comments box.

Here's a bit of background on the subject.

Atheism and popular culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia

Albert Einstein on the importance of faith in the reality of what we see

An event I did not happen to attend: British atheist graces Toronto

Spirituality and popular culture: Amazon's #1 atheist book is Christian

Religion: There is atheism, and then there is materialist atheism

The new atheists: Santa's sleigh came and went, and never gave them what they needed

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The Andes mountains opened up on both sides of us as we drove on one July afternoon along a highway that links Quito, the capital of Ecuador, with the smaller town of Ambato almost three hours further south. The setting sun shone head-on upon two volcanic giants- Tungurahua and Cotopaxi with its snow covered peak just visible through the cordillera. I had traveled along this road many times in previous years and had been repeatedly awe-struck by the sheer beauty of the surrounding land. Today fields extend as far as the eye can see, with the lights of small communities and villages illuminating the mountain slopes.

Volcanoes that periodically eject dangerous lava flows are a rich source of soil nutrients for Ecuadorian farmers. Still, in the eyes of organic chemists such as Claudia Huber and Guenter Wachtershauser there exists a more pressing reason for studying the world's 'lava spewers'- one that has everything to do with the unguided manufacture of prebiotic compounds (1). Huber and Wachtershauser's 2006 Science write-up on the synthesis of amino acids using potassium cyanide and carbon monoxide mixtures was heralded as groundbreaking primarily because of the 'multiplicity of pathways' through which biotic components could be made using these simple volcanic compounds (1).

Others have similarly weighed in with their own thoughts on volcanic origins (2-6). In the words of one notable Russian research team "the opportunity to define the pressure and temperature limits of [volcanic] microbiological activity as well as constrain its rate of evolution in a primordial environment is an exciting one, with implications for the origin of life on earth and existence of life elsewhere in the solar system" (3).

Whether it be Darwin's warm little pond or contemporary speculations over life-seeding environments we see in both a search for continuity from the non-living to the living- a search that was exemplified in Walt Disney's color and sound extravaganza Fantasia almost seventy years ago. Disney popularized origin of life theories by artistically proclaiming that volcanoes exploding and comets colliding were all that were needed to get life under way. According to such a portrayal the evolution of more complex multi-cellular forms would then naturally follow (7). Disney enthusiasts will no doubt find comfort in the decade-old New York Times prescription for a life-yielding brew:

"Drop a handful of fool's gold (the mineral iron pyrites) and a sprinkle of nickel into water, stir in a strong whiff of rotten eggs (caused by the gas hydrogen sulfide) and carbon monoxide, heat mixture near the crackle and hiss of a volcano and let simmer for an eon." (8)

Along a similar thread, journalist Tony Fitzpatrick cavalierly asserted that "conditions favorable for hydrocarbon synthesis also could be favorable for other life ingredients and complex organic polymers, leading...eventually to all sorts of cells and diverse organisms" (9). Of course skeptics of such depictions have their own armory of scientifically-valid reasons for denying that naturalistic earth models could have given us anything more than a geothermal sludge.

Perhaps the most persuasive of these comes from philosopher Stephen Meyer who in his most recent book Signature In The Cell supplied a mathematical treatise on the synthesis of bio-molecules (10). Following in the footsteps of fellow ID advocate William Dembski, Meyer has done us all a great service by showing how the chance assembly of a 150 amino-acid protein (1 in 10exp164) pales in front of the available probabilistic resources of our universe (10exp139 is the maximum number of events that could have occurred since the big bang) (10). In other words, we are stopped dead in our tracks by a probabilistic impasse of the highest order before we have even begun assessing the geological plausibility of competing origin of life scenarios.

The scientific method commits us to finding the best explanation for the phenomena we observe. Drawing from the opinions of NIH biologist Peter Mora, Meyer shows us how the chance hypothesis- that purports to explain how life arose without recourse to design or necessity- has been found wanting particularly in light of the ever-growing picture of the complexity of the cell (10). But the debate-clincher in Meyer's expose comes from his comprehensive summarization of the bellyaches associated with chemist Stanley Miller's controversial spark discharge apparatus (10).

Former colleagues of Miller concede that the highly reducing conditions he used in his experiments could not have been the mainstay of prebiotic earth (4). Nevertheless they further posit that localized atmospheric conditions around volcanic plums may have been reducing after all and that these could have given rise to life-seeding compounds (4). In their assessment:

"Even if the overall atmosphere was not reducing, localized prebiotic synthesis could have been effective. Reduced gases and lightning associated with volcanic eruptions in hot spots or island arc-type systems could have been prevalent on the early Earth before extensive continents formed. In these volcanic plumes, HCN, aldehydes, and ketones may have been produced, which, after washing out of the atmosphere, could have become involved in the synthesis of organic molecules. Amino acids formed in volcanic island systems could have accumulated in tidal areas, where they could be polymerized by carbonyl sulfide, a simple volcanic gas that has been shown to form peptides under mild conditions." (4)

Of course with so many 'could-haves' and 'may-haves' such a picture leaves us sitting on a vacuous flow of speculation rather than on a substantive bedrock of firm evidence. For seasoned biologist David Deamer the realization of implausibility, at least for a direct volcanic origin, comes from his own direct observations:

"Deamer carried with him a version of the "primordial soup"- a mixture of compounds like those a meteorite could have delivered to the early Earth, including a fatty acid, amino acids, phosphate, glycerol, and the building blocks of nucleic acids. Finding a promising-looking boiling pool on the flanks of an active volcano, he poured the mixture in and then took samples from the pool at various intervals for analysis back in the lab at UCSC. The results were strikingly negative: life did not emerge, no membranes assembled themselves, and no amino acids combined into proteins. Instead, the added chemicals quickly vanished, mostly absorbed by clay particles in the pool. Instead of supporting life, the bubbling pool had snuffed it out before it began." (6)

Not only has Meyer's probabilistic analysis supplied us with the odds that end the discussion for 'chance-philes', but contemporary extravagations over prebiotic earth have done nothing to bolster their credibility. We are left with little choice but to discard chance as a serious contender in the 'life origins' debate.

Literature Cited
1. Claudia Huber and Guenter Wachtersheuser (2006) a-Hydroxy and a-Amino Acids Under Possible Hadean, Volcanic Origin-of-Life Conditions, Science, Vol 314, pp. 630-632

2. A.J Teague, T.M Seward, A.P Gize, T. Hall (2005) The Organic Chemistry of Volcanoes: Case Studies at Cerro Negro, Nicaragua and Oldoinyo Lengai, Tanzania, American Geophysical Union, Fall Meeting 2005, abstract #B23D-04

3.John Eichelberger, Alexey Kiryukhin, and Adam Simon (2009) The Magma-Hydrothermal System at Mutnovsky Volcano, Kamchatka Peninsula, Russia, Scientific Drilling, No. 7, March , 2009, pp. 54-59

4. Adam Johnson, H. James Cleaves, Jason Dworkin, Daniel Glavin, Antonio Lazcano, Jeffrey L. Bada (2008) The Miller Volcanic Spark Discharge Experiment. Science 17 October 2008: Vol. 322, p. 404

5. David Grinspoon (2009) This Volcano Loves You, Denver Museum Of Nature & Science, COMMunity Blogs, See http://community.dmns.org/blogs/planetwaves/archive/2009/03/19/this-volcano-loves-you.aspx

6.Chandra Shekhar (2006) Chemist explores the membranous origins of the first living cell, UC Santa Cruz, Currents Online, See http://currents.ucsc.edu/05-06/04-03/deamer.asp

7.Fantasia, Walt Disney Home Video, Copyright by the Walt Disney Company, 1940

8. Nicholas Wade (1999) Evidence Backs Theory Linking Origins of Life to Volcanoes, New York Times, Friday, April 11, 1997

9.Tony Fitzpatrick (2000) Life's origins: Researchers find intriguing possibility in volcanic gases, http://record.wustl.edu/archive/2000/04-20-00/articles/origins.html

10. Stephen Meyer (2009) Signature In The Cell: DNA And The Evidence For Intelligent Design, Harper Collins Publishers, New York, pp. 215-228

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Can evolution explain religion?

In a recent issue of the leading journal Science , Elizabeth Culotta offers a variety of speculations in an article titled "On the Origin of Religion." Explaining religion without God is quite the growth industry these days among evolutionary psychologists. Some argue that religion exists because it increases evolutionary fitness (survival of the fittest). Others argue that it makes no difference to fitness. It is merely a glitch in our thinking that doesn't kill us off. They can't both be right, but they could both be wrong. Let's see.

For the rest, go here.

Also, just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience and spirituality, plus related issues

Can evolution explain religion?

Neuroscience and society: Emotional harm?

Neuroscience and society: Hate Area of Brain Identified?

How much attention should we pay to pundit predictions?

Intellectual freedom: The difference the blogosphere makes

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A philosopher wrote to some friends, including me, with the following problem: He was tired of the stupidity that passes for discussion over at certain Darwinist blogs that we will leave unnamed at present. He proposed to engage the bloggers and commenters in discussion.

Well, he certainly isn't the only person who has proposed this idea to me recently, and I offer no advice, only an observation: Nearly eighty percent of the academic evolutionary biologists are pure naturalists = no God and no free will. My friend intended confronting the Internet entities that are attracted to these key Darwinists, and help them out by pouring abuse on anyone who disputes the Law given on Mount Improbable.

My friend tells me, "... this is the strategy of the skunks. We need to let them stink alone and turn our attention elsewhere." Sensing I should say something in reply, I responded,

I hope you do not expect too much.

Science today is in a state of corruption, as Climategate shows.

The key problem is overreaching. Pretending to know things we don't in a very complex world, and using our pretense as an opportunity to promote an agenda to society.

Physicist Larry Krauss who spoke at our national science writers' meet in May, is an atheist who knows exactly how the universe will end, for sure, due to "science."

Look, every apocalyptic nut in a "The End Is Near" sandwich board knows that too.

Similarly, the Climategate scientists, their spinoff industries, and their media enablers know that human-caused global warming is true - and they know it in an essentially occult way.

The reason they behave as they do around data is the same as the reason Madam Rosa (a supposed psychic) does. Once people have decided to jettison facts in favour of what they need to believe - or need others to believe - they must protect a large and growing deficit.

One way of protecting the deficit from an honest evaluation is to attempt to discredit those who know about it and speak out. This works better if a mystique surrounds them (= we are "science") and if they are well thought of by elite social groups (= we support "science").

Darwinism is no different. In the absence of a large body of clearly established facts, speculation reigns triumphant. As the press release on Kombuisia (an Antarctic fossil) shows, publicity is often pursued for undisguised political ends. We really do not know very much about this very long extinct animal at all. But it can be co-opted for the global warming uproar.

Hence the chorus of ridicule you will face from the Darwinists and their hangers-on. They need Darwinism to be true, both for philosophical and pragmatic reasons, and treat as enemies of the truth anyone who questions it - and on so poor a ground as lack of evidence! What is the world coming to?

If evidence cannot be found, it will be grandfathered, manipulated, or speculated into existence. Anyone who doubts this process is labelled an "enemy of science," which saves a lot of bother with evidence.

Are people today truly afraid of science? Let's think this one out. Assume I have cancer, and the prognosis is poor. However, cancer researchers come up with a treatment protocol that scores a high success rate (without obvious ethical failings). Would I refuse to taxi down to the clinic to get it pronto, because of some theory about science?

In my experience, very few people are anti-science when a science fact base is demonstrated. If most patients (including myself) in this hypothetical case go into long-term remission, the fact base is demonstrated.

It is the same with crop science. Few farmers in the Third World turned down the Green Revolution, which is why the UN is now obsessing about a worldwide obesity problem, instead of the formerly more common “walking skeletons” problem.

Note that, in neither case does anyone much care what naysayers think. So there is no need for "Climategate" tactics in these matters.

But today, too much of what is called “science” is protected from honest evaluation by obfuscation, appeals to authority, attempts to control science media, concealment, labelling those who cannot replicate the results as cranks, persecution of dissenters, and pretending that speculation is evidence, among other unconstructive responses. Say what you want about that stuff, it is not a matrix for new discoveries.

I have every confidence that my friend will find a way to make the best use of his time.

Incidentally, skunks don't stink alone. Why be a skunk apart from the chance to stink in someone's face? That's the whole point.

Also at the Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Darwinism and popular culture: Socrates, the employment line forms out back, eight blocks from here, in front of a boarded-up door ...

Interview with me: What makes O'Leary tic - but those Word Guild people have ways of making me toc

Human evolution: Now "the Hobbit" may revise "major tenets of human evolution"?

Evolutionary psychology: If they are going to chase their tails anyway, why don't they stick to origin of life?

(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Win a free Privileged Planet DVD, courtesy the producers, for the best post answering any of the following questions:

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 13: The Large Hadron Collider is back up and running, but why?

Nine billion dollars and 15 years later, what is the Large Hadron Collider likely to tell us that is worth the cost and trouble?

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 14: Is backwards or forwards time travel really possible?

Two physicists have suggested that Hadron's woes are due to particles travelling back in time. Their theory has been received with the amusement one might expect, but it raises an interesting question, one that is a staple of sci-fi literature - is forward or backward time travel possible, even for particles?

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 15: Can Darwinism - or any evolution theory - help us predict life on other planets?

At Britain's Telegraph (November 04, 2009), Tom Chivers advises that "Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist."

Here are the contest rules, not many. Winners receive a certificate verifying their win as well as the prize. Winners must provide me with a valid postal address, though it need not be theirs. A winner's name is never added to a mailing list. Have fun!

Enter as many as you like.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist, my blog on the intelligent design controversy:

Afternoon coffee: If Darwinists worked in the private sector

Speciation: It’s all in how you play the tune?

Discovery Institutesuing California Science Center over alleged undisclosed documents

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

As many of us commence our holiday festivities toasting the year's end while earnestly drawing up personal lists of events that have shaped our lives, I would like to take a brief look at three achievements in the biological sciences- two historical and one more recent- that have struck me as nothing short of momentous in their significance. The first is the publication of a book which today continues to be an outstanding and extremely readable overview of the state of research in the genetics of animal embryology. The second is a landmark study that has brought into sharp focus the molecular mechanisms through which specific epigenetic factors modulate animal behavior. The third is the functional characterization of recBCD- a DNA-unwinding protein complex that plays a crucial role in bacterial recombination. I consider the scientists involved in each of these achievements to be pioneers- 'podium grabbers' who have performed medal-winning science in their respective fields of expertise.

I begin with accomplished Drosophila biologist Peter Lawrence who in his 1992 volume The Making Of A Fly: The Genetics Of Animal Design detailed with inimitable clarity how the patterning of body plans during embryogenesis is dependent on 'positional information' - the program through which cells recognize their positions within the body and differentiate accordingly. As Lawrence so eloquently described, individual cells recognize their positional coordinates through the activities of complex proteins called morphogens that form highly specified concentration gradients across the embryo.

Morphogens tend to be transcription factors that exert their effects by activating gene-specific promoters. In all there are four independent morphogen systems that determine embryonic patterning: (i) the anteroposterior bicoid protein gradient, (ii) the posterior Nanos protein gradient, (iii) the torso protein terminal system that defines the head and tail areas and (iv) the dorsoventral system which relies upon the activation of a cellular receptor called Toll. These four systems determine the fate of cells by acting as triggers for specialization. Strikingly each system exhibits a high degree of specification. That is, particular genes are only activated above defined morphogen concentration thresholds. Indeed dramatic experiments have shown just how disastrous variations in these thresholds can be to development.

The hierarchical nature of morphogenetic activation is the overarching feature of Lawrence's narrative. Gradient built upon gradient supply the different levels of genetic interpretation while so-called 'gap genes' play a critical role in the development of thoracic and abdominal body regions. Lawrence has written the story of embryogenesis in a language that debutant biologists can easily understand. His enviable ability to weave factual detail with the relevant experimental work makes The Making Of The Fly in every sense unique.

Beyond embryogenesis, the post-natal experiences of animals contribute to the shaping of long term behavior- a factor which I now consider in my second medal-winning choice. It has long been known that events during the early life of rodents have a marked effect on mental and physical health in adulthood. In particular mood and cognitive abilities can be adversely altered following prolonged periods of infant-mother separation. Animals experiencing such a maternal deficit during their early days later suffer from extreme hypersensitivities to stress-inducers. Now a group at the Max-Planck Institute Of Psychiatry in Germany has drawn a direct link between such behavioral anomalies and the methylation state of well-defined regions of DNA.

More specifically, infant-mother separation has been shown to cause a reduction in methylation of enhancers for the arginine vasopressin (AVP) hormone gene increasing the expression of AVP and ultimately disturbing brain endocrine hormone function. The resulting phenotypic changes are nothing short of remarkable- a significant loss of memory and decreased mobility in affected mice. Encouragingly these changes can be partially reversed using AVP receptor agonists- a finding that could have important medical ramifications given that these same enhancer regions are to be found across species including humans.

"This is the first study to depict a molecular mechanism by which stress early in life can cause effects later in life" McGill University epigeneticist Moshe Szyf noted in an interview with The Scientist magazine. The so-called hypomethylation of the AVP enhancer region was specific to an area of the brain that is intimately involved in stress related hormone release. The Max-Planck group further characterized the methylation-state interpretation enzymes, notably a protein called MeCP2, that couple DNA methylation to transcriptional repression. MeCP2 in particular represses transcription of AVP by binding to well-defined methylated regions of DNA. In animals suffering from maternal deficit, such a repression is reversed.

Nanomachines such as those that regulate transcription and DNA replication are ever-present throughout nature. A hot favorite of mine, the bacterial recombination recBCD complex, is also my third and final medal-winning choice. Andrew Taylor and Gerald Smith from the Fred Hutchinson Cancer Center in Seattle have brought the recBCD complex to life by showing how recB and recD operate as motors that allow the entire complex to travel along vast stretches of DNA. If either recB or recD de-couples from its DNA track the other is still there to guide the complex along in much the same way that an airplane with one engine down keeps flying albeit at a greatly reduced efficiency.

The recBCD complex epitomizes the general picture of a bacterial cell with all its components interacting in the most exquisite fashion to achieve highly specified functions. It is clear from Taylor and Smith's work that essential cellular processes require multi-component machines that mirror in concept and exceed in precision those that are used in our own designs. Coupling systems that resemble cable cars, monorail trains and tramways work in the cell ensuring that important cargo arrives where it is needed at exactly the right time.

So there we have it- a selection of biology 'faves' to ring in the holiday season. Between bites of turkey and forkfuls of ham we should spare a moment for those lab-bound researchers who have given us much food for thought in their daily ventures. After all, there remain many unanswered questions beyond the already-solved enigmas of science. As Lawrence himself cautioned, "there are glimpses of clarity- enough to see the immensity and beauty...and enough to know that there is still a long and challenging journey ahead".

Further Reading
Peter Lawrence (1992) The Making of a Fly- The Genetics Of Animal Design, Blackwell Scientific Publications, London

Chris Murgatroyd, Alexandre V Patchev, Yonghe Wu, Vincenzo Micale, Yvonne Bockmuehl, Dieter Fischer, Florian Holsboer, Carsten T Wotjak, Osborne F X Almeida & Dietmar Spengler (2009) Dynamic DNA methylation programs persistent adverse effects of early-life stress, Nature Neuroscience, published online 8 November 2009; doi:10.1038/nn.2436

Jef Akst (2009) Early Stress Alters Epigenome, The Scientist, Posted on 8th November, See http://www.the-scientist.com/blog/display/56139/

A.F. Taylor, Gerald Smith (2003) RecBCD enzyme is a DNA helicase with fast and slow motors of opposite polarity, Nature Volume 423, pp. 889-893

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

It's the ultimate branding strategy. Just slap "neuro" before a word and the goofiest speculation becomes respectable science." Here:

Unfortunately, neurotrash may not always be harmless nonsense in marketing departments about what color of car people choose. Increasingly, in the form of neurolaw, it is catching on in the legal profession, in the same way that lie detector tests did decades ago. What happened there was that some people learned to fake results - people who may well have committed serious crimes. Who knows how many others were damaged by false results when they were innocent?

A serious ethical question also erupts as to why the accused's brain should be scanned anyway. It is not a crime to think about a crime, only to act outside the law. Even if a brain scan showed the accused was thinking about it, that would never prove he did it. Lots of employees hate their boss and wish the boss would just drop dead. If you scanned their brains... well, let's say it's better not to go there. Very few employees actually commit a violent crime against the boss, so the brain scan evidence - even if reliable, which it probably isn't - is not worth gathering.

Also, we must consider traditional principles of law. Under English common law, if a person cannot be convicted on the external evidence of their intent and actions, that person cannot be convicted. Period. It is too bad if the prosecution team loses, even when morally certain that the accused is guilty. But that is an incentive to improve their procedures in normal ways.

Yes, it matters. Your family doctor should be reading this.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At the Mail Online, Allan Hall reports (November 23, 2009) on the case of a man who was conscious for 23 years, but no one knew because he was paralyzed.

A car crash victim has spoken of the horror he endured for 23 years after he was misdiagnosed as being in a coma when he was conscious the whole time.
Rom Houben, trapped in his paralysed body after a car crash, described his real-life nightmare as he screamed to doctors that he could hear them - but could make no sound.

'I screamed, but there was nothing to hear.

Read more here.

I think doctors should be much more careful with the "persistent vegetative state" (PVS) diagnoses than they sometimes are - if consequences follow. Some people - like Rom Houben, above - can be conscious without being mobile. We aren't even sure what consciousness is , after all, so why be definitive about who has it?

Here are some more articles about persistent vegetative state:

Is the patient vegetative or minimally conscious?

Neuroscience: Can locked-in sufferers tweet, using brain signals alone?

Another "human vegetable" turns out to be wired for thought

Also just up at The Mindful Hack is my blog on neuroscience and spirituality issues, which supports The Spiritual Brain:

Sociology: Should you add Satan to your Board of Directors?

Neuroscience and popular culture: Reasons not to buy "neuronovels" for people for Christmas

Neurolaw: Confusing intent with motive is a threat to civil rights

Neuroscience: "The Young and theBureau"

Spiritual Brain: Me 'n YouTube: Discussing my "Hot Apple Cider" essay

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

At Britain's Telegraph (November 04, 2009), Tom Chivers advises that "Darwinian evolutionary theory will help find alien life, says Nasa scientist.

Charles Darwin's theory of evolution may give pointers in the search for alien life, says a Nasa astrobiologist." Here, we learn two competing views:

And so the limits of Darwinian evolution will define the range of planets that can support life - at least Earth-like life."

but

... alien life may not be entirely Earth-like. Dr Baross said: "I'd like to point out there are many different ways for non-Earth-like life to not use light or chemical energy but use some other form like radiation energy, wave energy, or ultraviolet energy."

. And then how can we know that the way they proceed is by Darwinian evolution?

We also learn

"I think all of us really believe that rocky planets, like Earth, are going to be found at some point," said Baross.

Well, lots of people have really believed lots of things that never happened. I happen to agree with him re rocky planets, because in a galaxy the size of ours, we will doubtless find lots of things, possibly extraterrestrial life ...

I am a little more concerned about the underlying agenda in some cases. NASA could be undermining its chances via Darwin worship.

Some more exoplanet stories:

Does our solar system occupy a unique position in the universe or just an ordinary one?

Rare? Solar systems like ours are rare?

Astronomer argues that we can test whether Earth is fine-tuned as a science lab

Serious push to find more exoplanets

Exoplanets: Will intelligence be common or rare?

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Cosmology: We have now identified the "evil" alternative universe Stand by to open fire

Large Hadron Collider: If this "backwards time travel" is not a joke, it
should be

Coffee!! Bird drops piece of bread: Adds to Large Hadron Collider (God Machine) woes

Exoplanets: The recent pilgrimage to Darwin's shrine

Cosmology: If you needn't worry about paying the rent Friday, you can worry about this stuff

Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories about our universe.

Hat tip The Mustard Seed.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The search for extra-terrestrial life has been a passionate focal point of space exploration for decades. While the idea of aliens eking out an 'other-world' existence continues to fuel scientific and religious debate, most recently with the Pontifical Academy of Sciences' astrobiology conference (1), a similarly concerted search for life has focused on primitive unicellular organisms (2). Astrobiologist Richard Hoover and others have long advocated the idea that simple life exists outside of our own earth (3-4). Since NASA's Galileo spacecraft flyby mission to Jupiter's moon Europa in 1998, there has been no end to discussions over whether or not this ice-bearing moon might today harbor bacteria (5-6).

The notion that life could simply evolve wherever appropriate environmental conditions are to be found is of course one that entails an enormous 'leap of faith'. It is a notion that pushes aside a multitude of critical factors not least of which is the origin of some sort of information-rich genetic material. As Stephen Mojzsis from the University of Colorado analogized, just because the stage is set in a theater does not mean that the actors are present and ready to play their respective roles (7). What processes would have been operational to take a maelstrom of chemical compounds to the required level of minimal function upon which Darwinian natural selection could get a hold?

Paleontologist Niles Eldredge captured the pertinence of this question in his discourse on evolutionary tempos when he wrote how "there is a tremendous difference between a collection of organic molecules unable to abstract the energy needed to catalyze their own replication and an organized system that can do precisely that" (8). Prominent thinkers such as Paul Davies have made their appeal to chance by espousing the idea that life was able to begin precisely because it 'managed' to liberate itself from the shackles of physical laws and the deterministic, algorithmic world (9). Davies argues that for genomes to become as information-rich as they are, life would have had to have originated from random polymers since, according to Davies, an initial randomness is the only way that we could have arrived at specified biological complexity (9). Still, how could chance-generated polymers that lacked any functional and replicative activities have gained such activities purely through random events?

The last twenty years have given us some interesting avenues of research in the field of catalytic RNA. Experiments in the late 1980s and 1990s revealed that certain types of RNA had intrinsic catalytic activities (10). Renowned RNA biochemists such as Tom Cech, Dan Hershlag, Luc Jaeger and Anne Marie Pyle provided key details on how RNA could fold into catalytically active forms (10-12). With the demonstration of its enzyme and information-bearing capabilities, RNA became a hot candidate for the molecule that might have kick started the beginnings of life (13). The message promulgated by supporters of the much-publicized 'RNA World' was that through Darwinian natural selection random mutations might have produced catalytic activities that were further improved through successive generations of replication (13).

Perhaps to the disappointment of 'RNA Worlders', Duke University chemist David Deamer and others convincingly discredited such a message on the grounds that those processes necessary for the formation of RNA polymers would have been highly inefficient on a lifeless earth. Their conclusions were profound:

"It is now clear that an RNA world (or even its molecular precursor, pre-RNA) would be difficult to achieve directly from simple organic molecules dissolved in a global ocean (Joyce, 1991). Even if it were possible to generate chemically activated nucleotides capable of polymerizing into RNA in solution, in the absence of some concentrating mechanism these would be greatly diluted, and no further reactions could occur...[Such] inherent inefficiencies would seem to be inconsistent with moving beyond the initial stages of generating monomers and perhaps random polymers." (13)

My own research during my time at the University of Strasbourg served to further strengthen my own skepticism over the role of RNA in biological origins (14). Using RNA folding algorithms, I worked with others to design special catalytic RNAs called ribozymes that would target and cut highly defined mRNA sequences within the cell (See Figure Below; Ref 15). As I soon found out, not only did these molecular 'scissors' have to meet strict sequence requirements if they were to discriminate between target and erroneous mRNAs but they also had to be short enough so as to free themselves from their reaction products and become available for further rounds of cutting (16). This latter point is of critical importance if catalytic RNA is to exhibit what enzymologists call 'multiple turnover' behavior- that is, the ability to repeatedly catalyze a given reaction (17).

FIGURE: 12% Polyacrylamide Gel showing: Lanes 1,3- target RNA; Lanes 2,4- ribozyme RNA; Lanes 5-7- Time course of in vitro ribozyme digestion (note the cleavage products in the lower half of gel)

One could hardly claim that my meticulous crafting of RNA into functional catalysts paralleled the Darwinian process of selection. Had I not chosen my sequences carefully I would not have obtained the desired effects when I introduced these RNAs into the cell. My own findings echoed the sentiments of protein structuralist Thomas Creighton who commented how "the primary difficulty with the scenario of the RNA world is that it is difficult to explain how RNA molecules could have been synthesized chemically in the primordial soup" (18).

While several types of activity have now been identified in synthetic ribozymes including peptide bond formation and RNA ligation, the range of such activities pales in comparison to the extensive repertoire of known protein functions (19). To what extent can we therefore consider catalytic RNA to be sufficient for the formation of components that might later assemble into the simplest forms of life? Moreover, achieving such activities in the laboratory is only possible through the directed guidance of random RNA molecules towards pre-determined functional end points (19, 20).

Writing in the 1970's, Richard Dawkins cooked up the following 'requiem to naturalistic causation':

"[The Primeval Soup] must have become populated by stable varieties of molecules; stable in that either the individual molecules lasted a long time, or they replicated rapidly, or they replicated accurately. Evolutionary trends toward these three kinds of stability took place in the following sense: if you had sampled the soup at two different times, the later sample would have contained a higher proportion of varieties with high longevity/fecundity/copying-fidelity. This is essentially what a biologist means by evolution when he is speaking of living creatures, and the mechanism is the same- natural selection." (21)

Thirty years on we still have no meat on the bones of Dawkins' dreamy peregrinations. From an RNA World perspective at least I remain thoroughly unconvinced.

Literature Cited
1. Tom Chivers (2009) The Vatican Joins The Search For Alien Life, See http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/6536400/The-Vatican-joins-the-search-for-alien-life.html

2. David Malin (2004) Heaven and Earth: Unseen by the Naked Eye, Phaidon Press, UK 2004, p.284

3. Kate Tobin (2009) Extremophile Hunter: The search is on for extremophiles that may provide insights about life elsewhere in the cosmos, See http://www.nsf.gov/news/special_reports/science_nation/extremophile.jsp

4. Jeff Hecht (2001) Life will find a way, New Scientist, 17th March, 2001, p.4

5. Patrick Barry (2009) A Tale Of Planetary Woe, See http://science.nasa.gov/headlines/y2009/06nov_maven.htm?list207640

6. Clues To Possible Life On Europa May Lie Buried In Antarctic Ice (1998) See http://science.nasa.gov/newhome/headlines/ast05mar98_1.htm

7. Stephen Mojzsis spoke on the origins of life in a NOVA documentary that aired on PBS on the 28th of September 2004, entitled "Origins: How Life Began"

8. Niles Eldredge (1987) Life Pulse: Episodes From The Story of The Fossil Record, Facts On File Publications, New York, p.30

9. Paul Davies (1999) The Fifth Miracle, The Search for the Origin and The Meaning of Life, Simon & Schuster, New York, pp.250-257

10. T. R. Cech and D. Herschlag (1997) Group I Ribozymes: Substrate Recognition, Catalytic Strategies and Comparative Mechanistic Analysis, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.1-17

11. L. Jaeger, F. Mitchel, E. Westhof (1997) The Structure Of Group I Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.33-51

12. A.M. Pyle (1997) Catalytic Reaction Mechanisms and Structural Features of Group II Intron Ribozymes, Nucleic Acids and Molecular Biology, Vol 10 pp.75-107

13. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Vol 2 pp.371-381

14. Robert Deyes (1998) Unpublished observations, Work done at LPCCNM-UPRES 2308, Faculte De Pharmacie, Universite Louis Pasteur, Illkirch, France

15. Michael Zuker (2003) Mfold web server for nucleic acid folding and hybridization prediction, Nucleic Acids Res, Vol 31 pp.3406-15 (this is an update on the version I used in my research)

16. Daniel Herschlag (1991) Implications Of Ribozyme Kinetics For Targeting The Cleavage Of Specific RNA Molecules In Vivo : More Isn't Always Better, Proc. Natl, Acad, Sci. USA, Vol 88 pp.6921-6925

17. Thomas Creighton (1993) Proteins, Structure and Molecular Properties, W.H. Freeman and Company, New York, p.387

18. Ibid, p.107

19. Michael P. Robertson and William G. Scott (2007) The Structural Basis of Ribozyme-Catalyzed RNA Assembly, Science, Vol. 315 pp.1549-1553

20. Gordon C. Mills and Dean Kenyon (1996) The RNA World: A Critique, Origins & Design 17:1, See http://www.arn.org/docs/odesign/od171/rnaworld171.htm#note4

21. Richard Dawkins (1989) The Selfish Gene, 2nd Ed, Oxford University Press, Oxford, UK, p.18

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds?, we have declared a winner, and it is Philip W at 11.

Philip W must provide me with a valid postal address* via oleary@sympatico.ca, in order to receive the prize, a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD.

Philip W tells me that he is a pilot, and I liked his analysis of issues around flight:

Darwinian evolution can not possibly explain the life which we find on this planet. Let's explore one of these methods by asking the question "How, and why, did flight originate?" Before any creature took to the air there was nothing there to eat and so why would any creature, even an intelligent creature, want to fly. There could have been no powerful survival benefit in flight beyond perhaps escaping a predator to recommend it. Also, there are many other and far simpler ways to escape a predator. Flight is perhaps the most complicated and sophisticated activity that any creature possesses which means that it would have taken an extraordinary number of attempts by random evolutionary methods to make it a reality. There is another and even more fundamental question which underlies biological flight. Did nature, completely unguided by intelligence, just somehow know that flight was even possible or achievable? Humans, with their intelligence, were able to make gliders and toy airplanes long ago but they had an objective and they also had the model of the birds to follow. Even at that it took a long time to achieve human flight despite the huge cost in time, effort, and treasure which they were willing to expend. No amount of tinkering, especially without a conscious objective, could possibly account for biological flight. There are simply too many things which would have had to happen all at once for that to be possible. Remember that nature had no way of knowing that flight was possible and it certainly had no previous conception of flight. Without having an objective how can random tinkering achieve anything?

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Question 11: Can biotechnology bring back extinct animals?, we have declared a winner, and it is binary! Twins!

Aussie ID and Nakashima.

I loved Aussie ID's information about the specifics of attempts to restore the thylacine - he calls it a Tasmanian tiger. Possibly due to culture issues, I am more familiar with hearing the animal called a Tasmanian wolf. But anyone interested should review his information.

I'd love to know what a staked out* sled pack in northern Canada would make of the marsupial Tasmanian. He doesn't look to me like he has three coats of hair, so he might need to work in the office.

I also appreciated Nakashima's thoughtful reflections on the question of how behaviour might not follow the physical recreation of an animal. I suspect he's right; it's an open question indeed.

Each of you must provide me with a valid postal address** in order to receive the prize, a free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

If you go here, you will get a bit of background on the contest, and read many interesting contributions, but for now, here is the skinny:

This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it.

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone?

Additional notes on interesting posts as well.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

My concern with "neurolaw" (the attempt to scan brains to identify criminal behaviour) is this: Law is, or should be, concerned with "intent", not "motive."

Yes, yes, in detective fiction, everything hinges on motive: Cousin Harry murdered Aunt Sally to get her fortune; plain Jane murdered pretty Kitty because Kitty got the man; squadron leader Beeder murdered that guy because of a long ago wartime betrayal ....

However, real law depends on design inferences, not speculations about motive. Here is the story I sometimes tell to explain that:

Tom and Dick are enjoying beer and wings in a pub.

Suddenly, the conversation becomes loud and animated.

Tom seizes a dinner knife and tries to plunge it into Dick's chest. He is restrained by burly patron Harry and several others.

The whole thing is caught on videocam.

Mid-uproar, the bartender calls the police, who charge Tom with attempted manslaughter.

The police need not know his motive, only his intent - which was pretty obvious. That's a design inference.

Later, the investigating officer learns how the quarrel began: Dick had informed Tom that he was seeing Tom's girlfriend, so Tom should just buzz off. Tom didn't like that idea.

Knowing a person's motive certainly helps us understand the story. But intent - the demonstrated attempt at murder in this case - is what matters in law.

Here's the difficulty: Suppose Tom had just got up from the table and left, and spent three months fantasizing in the wee hours about killing Dick - without ever seeing either Dick or the former girlfriend again. He has plenty of motive, but the fact is, he never did anything.

Then Tom is of no interest to the law, as it now stands - though his family doctor should be concerned. Tom needs a more constructive way to deal with rejection. (He also needs a more faithful girlfriend, but all in good time.)

However, in a materialist environment, I would hardly be surprised to hear theories about Tom's violence genes and violence neurons, some based on neuroscience techniques - even if all the violence was inside his own head. Some may argue for action against Tom "pre-crime". That's where the threat to civil liberties comes in.

Neurolaw seems like materialism applied to law, hence a threat to civil rights, because it can easily confuse motive with intent - overturning centuries of progress in justice.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Intelligently Designed Nanotechnology

As Casey Luskin reveals in this episode of ID the Future, eminent biologists have said that they must continually remind themselves that what they see in biology evolved, and was not designed. But now engineers are turning to biology to replace human technology because biological pathways provide superior solutions to biomedical-technological needs. Is this trend more consistent with an evolved biosphere, or an intelligent designed one? Listen to this podcast and decide for yourself.

Listen here.

Yes, but sometimes people don't see the forest for the trees. The majority of humans think, where it is safe to do so, that there is a God, based on personal experience. No surprise there. If there is a God, he can communicate with humans when he wishes to do so, just as Elizabeth, Queen of England, can do*. And she would be the first to say that her rank is at a fundamentally much lower grade.

The question is, why is this controversial? Why should it be any surprise? Why do I keep running into efforts to prove it is not true?

If that is really science (space aliens, multiple universes), I could not distinguish it from witchcraft or some other foolishness. I think we'd just get more done if we accepted, with Antony Flew , that There IS a God and got on with useful projects in science, like cures for AIDS and non-polluting sources of energy. Oh, and weight loss programs for people who used to suffer from famine but are now afflicted with obesity - an outcome of modern science.

*I still have my father's commission, courtesy Elizabeth's father, advancing him to the rank of officer.

Also: Chris Mooney's War on Intelligent Design

Listen here.

On this episode of ID the Future, CSC's Rob Crowther interviews Casey Luskin about his in-depth response to Chris Mooney's The Republican War on Science, correcting fourteen major factual and logical errors in Mooney's chapter on intelligent design. How can Chris Mooney be so wrong on this issue? Listen in and find out.

Read the original response to Mooney here.

Yes, well, I don't know why anyone should be surprised. Darwinism has morphed into a major public enterprise and anyone who wants his finger in the pie ... I think we can wait a long time before a guy like Chris Mooney even needs to get anything right.

More stories from the Post-Darwinist:

Interesting design inference concerning a historic photo

Morning coffee!! Bear meets cat ... No! No! Not what you think!

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy, with comments

Darwinism and popular culture: A tour of the textbooks

(Note: This series may sometimes be interrupted by news from the crisis in intellectual freedom in Canada. If you are not interested, just scroll down.)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In Does curiosity kill more than the cat?, prof Stanley Fish wonders

Last Thursday, the new Chairman of the National Endowment for the Humanities James A. Leach gave an address at the University of Virginia with the catchy title, "Is There an Inalienable Right to Curiosity?"

Taking his cue from Thomas Jefferson's "trinity of inalienable rights: 'life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness,'" Leach reasoned that even though Jefferson never wrote about curiosity, "a right to be curious would have been a natural reflection of his own personality."

Interesting, considering that academic freedom is under huge assault these days.

I have said in private correspondence as follows:

It is good to be curious about the exact cause of Alzheimer syndrome or whether that fellow hanging around in the parking lot has lawful business around here.

It is not good to be curious about whether my neighbour is a closet racist or having an affair with the letter carrier.

I'd say curiosity is an inescapable and necessary human quality that must be steered in an appropriate direction.

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose PS: I know a bit about cats. Curiosity does kill cats sometimes. But kidney disease is their biggest problem. Cats are obligate carnivores. So they generally last as long as their kidneys - or so a vet once told me, and in my experience it is certainly true.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience issues:

Do you really need a refrigerator when you have this?

Materialism and popular culture: The human brain as a machine?

Spiritual Brain: Polish translation rights bought

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Neuroscience is, unfortunately, increasingly taken over by what I often describe as neurobullshipping. You know, neuroeconomics,, neurolaw ... It basically amounts to determining which regions of the brains of carefully chosen subjects light up when certain propositions are introduced.

Relief at last!

Here, at New Humanist, Raymond Tallis rallies the neuroskeptics ("Neurotrash", Volume 124, Issue 6, November/December 2009). 'Bout time someone did, I'd say. What's really good is that it comes from an unexpected quarter, at least for me.

He writes,

Hardly a day passes without yet another breathless declaration in the popular press about the relevance of neuroscientific findings to everyday life. The articles are usually accompanied by a picture of a brain scan in pixel-busting Technicolor and are frequently connected to references to new disciplines with the prefix "neuro-". Neuro-jurisprudence, neuro-economics, neuro-aesthetics, neuro-theology are encroaching on what was previously the preserve of the humanities. Even philosophers - who should know better, being trained one hopes, in scepticism - have entered the field with the discipline of "Exp-phi" or experimental philosophy. Starry-eyed sages have embraced "neuro-ethics", in which ethical principles are examined by using brain scans to determine people's moral intuitions when they are asked to deliberate on the classic dilemmas. Benjamin Libet's experiments on decisions to act and the work on mirror neurons (observed directly in monkeys but only inferred, and still contested, in humans) have been ludicrously over-interpreted to demonstrate respectively that our brains call the shots (and we do not have free will) and to point to a neural basis for empathy.

Yes, pop neuroscience is beginning to sound more like "evolutionary" psychology all the time.

Responding to Tallis's article's title, "Neurotrash", I wrote to friends to say, more or less,

What we need is a really big neuro-trash can.

The result of all this nonsense is that neuroscience gets discredited when it is, used appropriately, an immense help in medicine.

Remember, it was neuroscience that established that stroke victims were losing use of limbs through learned helplessness, not irreversible brain damage. Jeffrey Schwartz, Vince Paquette, Mario Beauregard and others have also demonstrated that non-drug, non-invasive treatments of mental disorders actually work - especially important for those disorders that cannot be effectively treated by drugs or surgery. (I am sure there are others whose work I do not know.)

Here's what I know for sure: I remember the rows on rows of beds in the chronic care hospital I used to volunteer at in the 1960s. Compare that to the much more favourable prospects brought about by the Decade of the Brain (1990s)! But it wasn't easy. One neuroscientist all but lost his career introducing the "learned helplessness" concept (why stroke patients, in many cases, lost the use of limbs through simple non-use). Only neuroscience could really have uncovered that.

That's the real story, and Tallis talks about it. We should stick to it.

It's also why I always say neuroscience should stay close to medicine and far from silliness - like which area of the brain lights up if a woman decides to buy the flaming yellow pants with movie star decals instead of the quiet brown pair*.

Seriously, however, in the justice system, neuroscience, inappropriately used, could be quite dangerous. Cf neurolaw.

If we can't convict an alleged perpetrator of a crime on the external evidence, we should not be trying to scan his brain.

Who cares what that guy thinks anyway?

It's not a crime around here to think, only to act in a way that is outside the law. If the prosecution can't prove he did it, then ... they can't make their case, and that's just too bad for them.

And, as I like to say, if you don't like English Common Law (= whose basic principle is that the accused is innocent unless proven guilty), please live in some jurisdiction where no one has ever heard of it. We like it here.

In the meantime, enough with this neurolaw stuff.

(*The Unforgivably Bad Taste region, maybe? Wonder where it is? Not many women could make that work.)

Review Of The Ninth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7; Imprint: Harper One

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Former Nature editor Philip Ball once commented that 'there is no assembly plant so delicate, versatile and adaptive as the cell" (1). Emeritus Professor Theodore Brown chose to wax metaphorical by likening the cell to a fully-fledged factory, with its own complex functional relationships and interactions akin to what we observe in our own manufacturing facilities (2). In recent years the seemingly intractable problem of explaining how the first cell came into existence through chance events, otherwise known as the 'Chance Hypothesis', has become more acute than ever as scientists have begun to realize that a minimum suite of functional components must exist for cells to be operational. Stephen Meyer's summary of the current state of this so-called 'minimal complexity' research is profoundly insightful:

"The simplest extant cell, Mycoplasma genitalium - a tiny bacterium that inhabits the urinary tract requires "only" 482 proteins to perform its necessary functions and 562,000 bases of DNA...to assemble those proteins...Based upon minimal-complexity experiments, some scientists speculate (but have not demonstrated) that a simple one-celled organism might have been able to survive with as few as 250-400 genes" (p.201).

For renowned biochemist David Deamer the first cell would at the very least have needed a polymerase enzyme to transcribe from a template such as DNA, a constant source of supplementary materials notably nucleotides, amino acids and ATP and enzymes that faithfully carry out DNA replication during cell division (3). To suppose that even a hypothetical first cell would just come together from a gimish of prebiotic compounds undergoing continuous destructive dilution is to appeal to the miraculous (4). Attempts to reconstruct such a cell start off from a fairly elaborate point of departure in which enzymes and other catalysts are already present and functional (5).

Just how important these functional enzymes are was brought to bear in a study led by University of North Carolina biochemist Richard Wolfenden (6). Wolfenden's team was able to demonstrate how a reaction with a half life of 2.3 billion years occurred in milliseconds when supplied with the necessary enzymes. Such spectacular differences are not uncommon. As Wolfenden remarked:

"What we're defining here is what evolution had to overcome...the enzyme is surmounting a tremendous obstacle, a reaction half-life of 2.3 billion years...Without catalysts, there would be no life at all, from microbes to humans. It makes you wonder how natural selection operated in such a way as to produce a protein that got off the ground as a primitive catalyst for such an extraordinarily slow reaction." (6)

Through a molecular technique known as random mutagenesis, scientists have now quantified the amino acid sequence variability that functional proteins can tolerate. Worthy of note in this field is the work of former Cambridge biochemist Douglas Axe whose data forms a pillar for the case that Meyer presents in his book. Using locally-randomized sequence libraries of a portion of the antibiotic resistance enzyme Beta lactamase, Axe calculated that somewhere between 1 in 10exp50 and 1 in 10exp77 150 amino acid-long protein folds form configurations with a Beta lactamase function (7). Of these one in 10exp50 to 1 in 10exp74 form folded structures that might perform any number of alternative functions (7).

Based on the structural requirements of enzyme activity Axe emphatically argued against a global-ascent model of the function landscape in which incremental improvements of an arbitrary starting sequence "lead to a globally optimal final sequence with reasonably high probability" (7). For a protein made from scratch in a prebiotic soup, the odds of finding such globally optimal solutions are infinitesimally small- somewhere between 1 in 10exp140 and 1 in 10exp164 for a 150 amino acid long sequence if we factor in the probabilities of forming peptide bonds and of incorporating only left handed amino acids.

In a 1981 legal challenge involving the Arkansas Board Of Education, astronomer Chandra Wickramasinghe appeared for the defense as an expert witness. Taking on the dogmatic neo-Darwinist view on the origins of life, Wickramasinghe unwaveringly proclaimed that the probability of obtaining the information necessary for making the simplest cell by chance was 1 in 10exp40,000 (8). These estimates not only exceeded by many powers of 10 the total number of atoms available in the universe but also closely matched the minimal complexity predictions discussed above. By pulling together these probabilistic threads of evidence in Signature In The Cell, Meyer has relegated naturalistic life origin models to little more than fanciful speculation. His piece-by-piece dismissal of the chance hypothesis is beautifully executed as is the personal narrative that interconnects the various portions of his scientific story.

Additional Literature Cited
1. Philip Ball (2001) Life's Lesson In Design, Nature, Vol 409 pp. 413-416
2. Theodore Brown (2003) The Art of the Scientific Metaphor, The Scientist, Volume 17, Issue 21, p. 10
3. David Deamer, Jason Dworkin, Scott Sandford, Max Bernstein, Louis Allamandola (2002) The First Cell Membranes, Astrobiology, Volume 2, pp. 371-381
4. Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984) The Mystery of Life's Origin: Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas, pp.42-68
5.Tamsin Osborne (2008) 'Artificial Cell' Can Make Its Own Genes, New Scientist,1 April, 2008, See http://www.newscientist.com/article/dn13568-artificial-cell-can-make-its-own-genes.html
6. Without Enzyme, Biological Reaction Essential To Life Takes 2.3 billion Years: 2008 UNC Study, See http://www.med.unc.edu/www/news/2008-news-archives/november/without-enzyme-biological-reaction-essential-to-life-takes-2-3-billion-years-unc-study/?searchterm=Wolfenden
7. Douglas D. Axe (2004) Estimating the Prevalence of Protein Sequences Adopting Functional Enzyme Folds, Journal Of Molecular Biology, pp. 1295-1315
8. See Chandra Wickramasinghe's testimony at the 1981 Arkansas trial on creation which can be found at http://www.panspermia.org/chandra.htm

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Sometimes, when discussing the much misunderstood Scopes Trial, I have referred to the textbook from which Scopes was teaching, Hunter's Civic Biology, which seems to have been an amalgam of civics and biology, with a dose of eugenics thrown in, and smug assertions about "highest" or "lowest". Bad idea. Enough already with total subject confusion, ecological misunderstanding, and useless social conflict. Here's an interesting site where Ron Ladouceur gives us a tour of exotic textbooks of our storied past.

I am glad my own biology teachers focused on the cell theory of life, the germ theory of disease, and the life and times of the endangered ribbon snake (= ecology).

There is only so much students will take away when they graduate (if they do) , and you want it to be something they can make sense of in dealing with their own life and environment.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "When Listening to Music, Your Brain Is ‘Moving’ Even If You Are Not," a news release from the Society for Neuroscience (10/15/06), we learn,

One of the best-studied features in orientation maps is known as a pinwheel, a small region in which all orientations are represented in segments that appear to come to a point. "A long-standing question is, 'How are neurons arranged in the pinwheel centers?'" says R.C. Reid, PhD, of Harvard Medical School.

Reid provided the answer by using two-photon calcium imaging, which determines the physiological response of hundreds of cells simultaneously as well as their precise location in the cortical circuit.

"By recording from hundreds to thousands of neurons at each pinwheel center, we demonstrated that pinwheel centers are remarkably well organized," he says.

"Neurons selective to different orientations are arranged in an orderly manner even in the very center," he adds. "There was virtually no mixing of cells with different orientation preferences even at the center. Thus, pinwheel centers truly represent singularities in the cortical map." This finding is suggesting extraordinary precision in the development of cortical circuits.

and much else.

Ignore all the yap about evolution in the article, which is - as typical - intended to distract attention from the obvious conclusion.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

When it comes to academic triumphs and laudatory honors it can be said that mycologist Paul Stamets has his fair share. Stamets has authored six books on mushrooms, holds over twenty patents, is a winner of the Collective Heritage Institute's Bioneers Award and owns a wholesale business selling alternative medicines. Today he also runs a facility that boasts twenty four laminar flow benches across four laboratories processing between 10-20 thousand kilos of mycelia each week. He has close to a thousand mycelium cultures growing at any given time and is renowned across the world for his view of fungi as the 'grand molecular dissemblers of nature'.

Stamets describes himself in his youth as a hippy with a stuttering habit who could not look people in the eye. He also fondly recalls once telling his charismatic Christian mother that the forest is where he goes to church on Sundays. He spent many years as a microscopist at the Evergreen State College in Washington studying mushroom mycelia with the aid of an electron microscope. There he developed an intense passion for all things fungal even to the extent that he now occasionally appears in public sporting a hat made from Amadou- a fungus that, he boldly maintains, was essential for the portability of fire during man's much-heralded migration out of Africa.

When it comes to mushrooms, Stamets' most radical concept, and perhaps his most attractive one, draws on a human parallel. In fact he proposes that that organized networks of mycelia under our feet form the earth's own 'internet' of sorts carrying antibiotics and enzymes as well as huge numbers of signaling chemicals across trillions and trillions of end branchings. In short, he sees our own Internet superhighway as a mere replica of a highly-successful system that already exists in nature's own backyard. Perhaps surprisingly these networks are not confined to land habitats. Indeed aquatic underwater mushrooms have been discovered in the streams of southern Oregon and mycologists are now busily investigating how these hydrophiles survive and affect surrounding ecosystems.

Agarikon is yet another fungal species that gets mycologists such as Stamets visibly excited. Otherwise known as the 'elixir of long life', this impressively-sized fungus has been used for years as an effective treatment for respiratory diseases such as tuberculosis and is now known to exhibit a very potent effect against the smallpox and flu viruses. There is strong evidence that the active anti-virals in Agarikon might also serve well in the present-day combat against H1N1 and H5N1. In fact so critical to human health are the medicinal properties of this remarkable organism that Stamets has embarked on his own mini-crusade to create the largest Agarikon genomic DNA library in the world.

On a more serious note, many environmentalists claim that today we are fully engaged in the biggest mass extinction event that our planet has ever known. Stamets is not one to shy away from sounding alarm bells and boldly adheres to the claim that 50% of all known species on our planet could become extinct over the next 100 years if swift action is not taken. His use of oyster mushroom mycelia to remove oil pollution is an outstanding example of how we might avert such a bleak endpoint. These saprophytic fungi are gateway species that break down toxic waste through the action of specialized enzymes and thereby allow damaged ecosystems to flourish and rebound. Oyster mushrooms have also been shown to have a dramatic effect on bacterial titers destroying coliform bacteria and Staphylococcus in contaminated waters.

The environmental resiliency of fungi has long fascinated mycologists, and future mycotechnologies might build on this salient property. While Prototaxites- a 30-foot long, 3-foot high mushroom that lived 350-420 million years ago stands as the archetypal giant fungus, the twenty two-hundred acre, one cell thick mycelium mat of Armillaria ostoyae (honey mushroom) now holds the record for the largest organism in the world. Thermo-resilient symbionts such as Curvularia confer a viral-dependent heat tolerance on many grasses allowing them to grow at elevated temperatures, as high as 104 F in some cases.

Fungi can be described as being parasitic, saprophytic, micorrhizal or endophytic in their modes of deriving nourishment. This so-called 'mycological guild' of complementary fungi is what gives rise to a healthy ecosystem. The interactivity of these fungi and other organisms is clearly visible in ant cultivars of the Lepiota mushroom which are used by thatch ants to stop a particularly aggressive parasitic fungus called Escovopsis from invading their nests. In a converse strategy, Metarhizium is a parasitic fungus that kills carpenter ants and is therefore finding application in the protection of buildings from these would-be aggressors. By using the non-sporulating stage of Metarhizium, Stamets has surpassed the carpenter ants' own ability to keep the fungus at bay thereby providing him with an effective treatment against carpenter ant infestations.

Despite such mycotechnological advances, Stamets describes the current state of the field as being under-respected, underappreciated and underfunded. Most importantly he remains steadfastly focused on restoring ecosystems for the enjoyment of generations to come. For those of us actively involved in the evolution/ID debate, Stamets' findings are likewise poignantly relevant. In fact he makes a stunning claim regarding computer and fungal networks noting how "we were destined to create the computer Internet at a time when the earth is in crisis".

That our understanding of network theory and its importance in fungal bioremediation should coincide with our earth's need for ecological intervention introduces a teleological, purposeful perspective to life that contradicts the contingency of orthodox Darwinism. After all a cosmos that is fashioned towards such an endpoint is incompatible with the random, directionless tenet of natural selection. As for the Christian faithful there is one proclamation that makes sense in our current predicament: Thank God that the forests are where mycologists choose to go to church on Sundays!

For further details on Stamets' work see How Mushrooms Can Save The World at http://tiny.cc/iecmw, (Login: Promega; Password: mushroom)

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Even though I am not a creationist by any reasonable definition, I sometimes get pegged as the local gap tooth creationist moron. (But then I don't have gaps in my teeth either. Check the unretouched photos.)

As the best gap tooth they could come up with, a local TV station interviewed me about "superstition" the other day.

The issue turned out to be superstition related to numbers. Were they hoping I'd fall in?

The skinny: Some local people want their house numbers changed because they feel the current number assignment is "unlucky."

Look, guys, numbers here are assigned on a strict directional rota. If the number bugs you so much, move.

Don't mess up the street directory for everyone else. Paramedics, fire chiefs, police chiefs, et cetera, might need a directory they can make sense of. You might be glad for that yourself one day.

Anyway, I didn't get a chance to say this on the program so I will now: No numbers are evil or unlucky. All numbers are - in my view - created by God to march in a strict series or else a discoverable* series, and that is what makes mathematics possible. And mathematics is evidence for design, not superstition.

The interview may never have aired. I tend to flub the gap-tooth creationist moron role, so interviews with me are often not aired.

* I am thinking here of numbers like pi, that just go on and on and never shut up, but you can work with them anyway. (You just decide where you want to cut the mike.)

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and academic culture: ID film banned

Darwinism and academic culture: Darwinists blither on in the face of the gathering storm

Biotechnology: The quest to bring back extinct animals

Fun with Mark Steyn, but when isn't Mark Steyn fun?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For Uncommon Descent Provide the Code: for Dawkins' WEASEL Program, we have declared a winner - 377 responses later - and it is Oxfordensis:

It seems that Dawkins used two programs, one in his book THE BLIND WATCHMAKER, and one for a video that he did for the BBC (here's the video-run of the program; fast forward to 6:15). After much beating the bushes, we finally heard from someone named "Oxfordensis," who provided the two PASCAL programs below, which we refer to as WEASEL1 (corresponding to Dawkins's book) and WEASEL2 (corresponding to Dawkins's BBC video). These are by far the best candidates we have received to date.

Go here for more.

Note: Apparently, Bill Dembski is taking care of the award.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Review Of The Eighth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; Imprint: Harper One

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

In the middle ages, Moses Maimonides debated heavily with Islamic philosophers over the Aristotlean interpretation of the universe. By looking at the stars and seeing their irregular pattern in the heavens, he concluded that only design could have generated the star arrangements he observed (1). In the process he ruled out necessity and the Epicurean ideology of chance. Centuries later Isaac Newton similarly opted for design as the best explanation for the origins of our solar system. Writing in his General Scholium for example Newton left us with no doubt over where his focus lay:

"This most beautiful system of sun, planets, and comets could only proceed from the counsel and dominion of an intelligent and powerful Being" (2).

Still, with the revolutions in thought brought forth by the likes of Pierre Simon Laplace and of course later Charles Darwin, the stage was set for chance and necessity to become the only players permissible in scientific discourse (1). Today science operates under the conviction that the material world "is all there is, and that chance and impersonal natural law alone explain, indeed must explain, its existence" (3).

So, what of chance? When statisticians refer to chance events what they really mean is that the exact combination of physical factors that cause these events are so complex that their occurrence cannot be reasonably predicted. Implicit in an appeal to chance is the negation of any sort of law-like necessity or Maimonidean-style recourse to design. On the flip side, Stephen Meyer reminds us in Signature In The Cell that that chance hypotheses can be eliminated when "a series of events occurs that deviates too greatly from an expected statistical distribution" (p.180).

A casino player winning 100 bets consecutively while spinning a roulette wheel is an obvious example of such a deviation. But low probability in itself is not enough for detecting design. Indeed fundamental to this particular non-chance alternative is the recognition of some sort of discernible pattern- 100 wins on a roulette wheel for example- that compels us to suspect that an intelligence somewhere is directing the outcome.

For Meyer such insights were seeded through conversations he held with philosopher William Dembski in the hallways of academia as he grappled with questions relating to life's origins. Much to the chagrin of the Darwin-faithful, today Dembski not only contends that design, "is a legitimate and fundamental mode of scientific explanation on a par with chance and necessity" but also argues that there exists a set of criteria for reliably detecting design in biology (1).

Pattern discernment, Dembski asseverates, can be retrospectively applied; that is, to events that have already occurred. Indeed as any spy buff will attest, cryptoanalysts routinely decode signals only after these signals have been generated and transmitted. Intelligent involvement in such cases can either be ruled in or out through a thorough examination of the available probabilistic resources (4).

In Signature In The Cell Meyer builds on Dembski's cornerstone case and uses a seemingly non-ending supply of illustrations to firm up his own supportive arguments. But the reader is nevertheless left pondering over what relevance such illustrations have to the matter at hand, namely demonstrating that the origin of life requires more than just chance. Meyer meticulously alleviates such concerns with a component-by-component breakdown of the probabilistic resources of our cosmic landscape. He writes:

"There are a limited number of opportunities for any given event to occur in the entire history of the universe. Dembski was able to calculate this number by simply multiplying the three relevant factors together: the number or elementary particles (10⁸⁰) times the number of seconds since the big bang (10¹⁶) times the number of possible interactions per second (10⁴³). His calculation fixed the total number of events that could have taken place in the observable universe since the origin of the universe at 10¹³⁰" (pp.216-217).

Applying his calculations on limits to biology Meyer notes:

"the probability of producing a single 150 amino acid protein by chance stands at about 1 in 10¹⁶⁴. Thus for each functional sequence of 150 amino acids there are at least 10¹⁶⁴ other possible non-functional sequences of the same length...Unfortunately that number vastly exceeds the most optimistic estimate of the probabilistic resources of the entire universe- that is the number of events that have occurred since the beginning of its existence" (p.217).

While such a rationale has already been advanced in the peer-reviewed literature (5), it is as profoundly relevant today as it was in its original context. Those design heisters who acrimoniously steal intelligent design away from the realm of biology do so at a tremendous cost to us all. Intelligent design is after all not 'pie in the sky' story telling. It is rigorous science.

Literature Cited
1.William Dembski (2002), No Free Lunch: Why Specified Complexity Cannot Be Purchased Without Intelligence, Rowman & Littlefield Publishers, Inc, Lanham, Maryland, pp.1-3

2. Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton (1994), The Soul of Science: Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy; Crossway Books; Wheaton, Illinois, p.91

3. Guillermo Gonzalez and Jay Richards (2004), The Privileged Planet, How Our Place In The Cosmos Is Designed For Discovery, Regnery Publishing Inc, Washington D.C, New York, p.224

4. For a review of probability as relates to the biological context see Robert Deyes and John Calvert (2009), We Have No Excuse: A Scientific Case for Relating Life to Mind, Intelligent Design Network, See http://www.intelligentdesignnetwork.org/We_have_no_excuse.pdf

5. Stephen C. Meyer (2004), The Origin Of Biological Information And The Higher Taxonomic Categories, Proceedings of the Biological Society of Washington, Volume 117, pp. 213-239

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In the Huffington Post, Rick Smith (October 9, 2009) notes

In a 2005 article for the United Kingdom's Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London, physicist Henry Stapp and psychiatrist Jeffrey Schwartz showed that sustained concentrated attention on any particular mental experience-a thought, an insight, an image, even a fear-not only kept the brain circuitry involved open and alive but also eventually produced physical changes in the brain's structure. In effect, by increasing attention, you are creating brain architecture specifically suited to the challenges before you. Little wonder, then, that performance should grow dramatically.

Schwartz is the lead author of The Mind and the Brain, which sets forth this thesis in more detail. Basically, our minds become what we focus attention on, and this can be good or bad for us, depending on what that is.

Meanwhile, this Dark Age blog post (October 11 2009) mentions both Mario Beauregard, the third author of the 2005 paper and yours truly as well.

Also just up at The Mindful Hack

Neurolaw: Mind readers bustle into the court room

Mind and society: Why you can trust the people, when they have a chance

Neuroscience: Stuff I didn't need to hear about what people care about, but pass along anyway

Atheism and pop culture: Religious commitment as mild dementia?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Review Of The Seventh Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The distinction between historical and experimental science is one that extends back over the centuries and at its core seems easy to grasp. Whereas historical science has as its focus events that have defined the history both of our planet and larger cosmos, experimental science has its eye on the current operation of nature.

The 19th century philosopher William Whewell coined the term 'palaetiological sciences' to describe those fields of science, such as geology and paleontology, that have a historical perspective (1). Whewell's broad application of the term shone through in his two great works, his History of the Inductive Sciences and his Philosophy of the Inductive Sciences (1). Immanuel Kant used a similar distinction contrasting those sciences that describe "relationships and changes over time" with those that deal with the "empirical study and classification of objects...at present" (2).

As part of their analytical process, scientists routinely assess the validity of competing hypotheses to determine which best explain the data they have at their disposal. The late Cambridge philosopher Peter Lipton formally defined such a process of validation in his book Inference To The Best Explanation (3). Put simply, Lipton considered the best explanation for the occurrence of a natural event as one that obviously best identifies a likely cause. Lipton's formalization rode on the back of 19th century geologist Thomas Chamberlin's 'method of multiple working hypotheses' (4) and provided an improvement over Charles Peirce's abductive reasoning- the process through which an established rule is used to explain a tangible observation (5).

Abductive reasoning would have us say that given a rule such as "If it rains the grass is wet", the occurrence of wet grass must invariably lead to the conclusion that rain had fallen at some moment in the past (5). Nevertheless Peirce was quick to identify an inherent fallacy in such a thread of logic- a fallacy known amongst philosophers as the 'affirmed consequent'. According to one review:

"Affirming the consequent, sometimes called converse error, is a formal fallacy committed by reasoning in the form: If P, then Q. Q. Therefore, P. Arguments of this form are invalid in that [they] do not always give good reason to establish their conclusions, even if their premises are true." (5)

In the above illustration, the fallacy is all too evident since rain is quite obviously not the only causal agent that waters our lawns (summertime sprinklers and hose pipes stand out as self-evident alternatives!). The question that naturally follows is, given numerous causally adequate explanations, how might one go about deciding which supplies the greatest explanatory power?

One way is to resort to vera causa ("causes now in operation") as Darwin did when he used animal migration behaviors to explain common descent. According to Darwin "the simplicity of the view that each species was first produced within a single region captivates the mind. He who rejects it, rejects the vera causa of ordinary generation with subsequent migration, and calls in the agency of a miracle" (6). Darwin of course assumed that the 'now operational' variations observed in animal breeding could likewise explain macro-evolutionary changes throughout the history of life.

An alternative approach to the causal adequacy question is to seek out additional lines of evidence that either prop up or debunk competing explanations. Stephen Meyer expounds on this salient point in the seventh chapter of his most recent book Signature In The Cell,

"the process of determining the best explanation often involves generating a list of possible hypotheses, comparing their known (or theoretically plausible) causal powers against the relevant evidence, looking for additional facts if necessary, and then, like a detective, progressively eliminating potential but inadequate explanations until, finally, one causally adequate explanation for the ensemble of relevant evidence remains" (p.166)

Historical scientists are of course not the only group to employ such a procedural chain. Meyer's impressive list of distinguished professions- including clinical diagnosticians and forensic detectives- that are 'cause-focused' in their modes of operation, gives us much to ponder over. And his follow-on question is brilliantly relevant- might not intelligent design supply the most causally adequate explanation for the origin of biological information? The answer may surprise some. It turns out that by the same 'vera causa' line of reasoning used by Darwin 150 years ago, intelligent causation in biology remains a distinct possibility. After all, a cornerstone claim in the ID offensive is that we routinely observe intelligent agents as 'causes now in operation' that generate the same type of specified information as we find in DNA.

Meyer goes on to boldly entertain the idea that intelligent design presents us with the only causally adequate explanation for the origin of biological information and spends much of the remainder of his book tying together substantial evidence in support of his position. As for Darwin, one can only imagine how he might have felt coming back to find intelligent design legitimized through his very own criterion. My hunch is that he would have applauded the current state of debate.

Citations Listed
1. For a summary of Whewell's work, see biologist Robert J O'Hara's discussion at http://rjohara.net/darwin/palaetiology

2. Phillip R. Sloan (2006), Kant On The History Of Nature: The ambiguous heritage of the critical philosophy for natural history, Stud. Hist. Phil. Biol. & Biomed. Sci. 37 (2006), pp.627–648

3. Peter Lipton: Philosopher of science renowned for his account of inference and explanation, Obituary appeared in The Guardian, Thursday 13th December, 2007, See http://www.guardian.co.uk/news/2007/dec/13/guardianobituaries.obituaries1

4. For a detailed account of Thomas Chamberlin's work, see http://geology.about.com/od/history_of_geology/a/aa_geothinking.htm

5. See Absolute Astronomy, http://www.absoluteastronomy.com/topics/Abductive_reasoning

6. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York, p.488

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

We are told (in a Nova program, Ghost in your Genes, October 16, 2007) ,

Scientists have long puzzled over the different fates of identical twins: both have the same genes, yet only one may develop a serious disease like cancer or autism. What's going on? Does something else besides genes determine who we are? In this program, NOVA reveals the clues that have led scientists to a new picture of genetic control and expression. One such clue is the surprisingly modest number of genes that turned up when technology made it possible to map the human genome. The Human Genome Project was originally expected to find at least 100,000 genes defining the human species. Instead the effort yielded only about 20,000 - about the same number as in fish or mice - too few, some believe, to account for human complexity. Learn more about the connection between epigenetics, aging, and cancer on the program's companion website.

"What's going on? Does something else besides genes determine who we are?"

Um, yes. Here are three obvious observations right away:

- All we need to know about any life form is not necessarily in its DNA, as the program makes clear. Frustratingly, the true causes and cures of cancer and autism are controversial and clouded.

But our DNA is not a book of magic in which all the answers are written, and it is too bad if anyone thought it was.

- Identical twins may have almost-identical DNA, but usually one is the dominant twin and the other the sub-dominant one. Also, they tend to separate as adults and have different experiences. Over a lifetime, these differences can add up.

- Also, humans are intelligent and make choices. Different choices lead to different outcomes. The fact that anyone should doubt that this occurs and would be important is a symptom of the damage materialism (= you are either a robot or a monkey) has done to science.

See also Identical twins does not mean identical minds

Intelligence: How much is heredity and how much is environment

How much brain do you need?

Hat tip: Stephanie West Allen at Brains on Purpose

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

Neuroscience: More "brain in a vat" talk

Religion: Does religious literacy matter?

Religion: Putting God on trial once again

Learning and self-esteem

Mental health: Use of psychiatry as torture

Neurolaw: Simulated study stirs debate

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This one's a bit of fun, but there is a serious purpose behind it. Go here to enter.

In "A Life of Its Own: Where will synthetic biology lead us?" (September 28, 2009 New Yorker mag), Michael Specter reports, "If the science truly succeeds, it will make it possible to supplant the world created by Darwinian evolution with one created by us."

Jurassic Park, anyone? Consider this:

... researchers have now resurrected the DNA of the Tasmanian tiger, the world’s largest carnivorous marsupial, which has been extinct for more than seventy years. In 2008, scientists from the University of Melbourne and the University of Texas M. D. Anderson Cancer Center, in Houston, extracted DNA from tissue that had been preserved in the Museum Victoria, in Melbourne. They took a fragment of DNA that controlled the production of a collagen gene from the tiger and inserted it into a mouse embryo. The DNA switched on just the right gene, and the embryo began to churn out collagen. That marked the first time that any material from an extinct creature other than a virus has functioned inside a living organism.

It will not be the last. A team from Pennsylvania State University, working with hair samples from two woolly mammoths—one of them sixty thousand years old and the other eighteen thousand—has tentatively figured out how to modify that DNA and place it inside an elephant’s egg. The mammoth could then be brought to term in an elephant mother. "There is little doubt that it would be fun to see a living, breathing woolly mammoth—a shaggy, elephantine creature with long curved tusks who reminds us more of a very large, cuddly stuffed animal than of a T. Rex.," the Times editorialized soon after the discovery was announced. "We're just not sure that it would be all that much fun for the mammoth."

The article discusses both the promise and the peril or reengineering nature.

Personally, I am a bit skeptical that an extinct creature can be resurrected from DNA alone, but ... wait! What I thought was passing traffic turned out to be a herd of tyrannosaurs heading off to eat the McDonalds.

So now to Uncommon Descent Contest Question 11: For a free copy of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), how likely do you think biotechnologists will be in bringing back the Tasmanian wolf or the woolly mammoth? You can try the tyrannosaur too if you are feeling ambitious.

Here are the contest rules, not an extensive read.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's the latest UD Contest Question, so use this link to enter.

Addressing the Inbox, I discovered this most interesting tale about lotteries in Bulgaria, a tale that reminds me of a similar suspicious lotto in my own Canadian province of Ontario.

In Money Matters, at Australia's news.com, we learn that "Lottery numbers the same in consecutive draws in Bulgaria" (correspondents in Sofia, Agence France-Presse, September 16, 2009)

Here are the bullet points, and you can read the rest yourself.

- The numbers 4, 15, 23, 24, 35, and 42 were drawn two weeks in a row / File
- Same numbers picked in consecutive draws
- Review of the national lottery is ordered
- Probability is 4.2 million to one

Hmmmm. If these charges are true, I'm glad I am not in charge of that investigation. I would hardly want to hear all the lies people would probably try to tell me. Our Ontario premier, faced with a similar situation, fired the chair and the whole board of the lottery corporation and decided to start fixing the problem from scratch. I would recommend looking for statisticians and tough cops, not just anyone with the "power from behind" to sit through an endless board meeting.*

But here's the question that this and other questionable lottery stories leaves me with: The intelligent design theorists emphasize probability issues. Their chief knock against Darwinism is that it appears improbable. In the same way, an accidental origin of the fine-tuned values of our universe appears improbable. If I understand the matter correctly, the universe is assumed to be over 13 billion years old, or so, and Earth over 4 billion years old. (I assume these values for convenience as I believe them to be generally accepted.) So we can assume a basis for computing probability.

So, for a free copy of the Privileged Planet DVD, which addresses the fine tuning of the universe:

Uncommon Descent Contest Question 12: Can Darwinism beat the odds. If not, why not? If so, how?

You might want to look at Bill Dembski's No Free Lunch.

(Note: Thanks to Ilion Troas for alerting me to this story.)

*One alternative: Don't have a lottery at all. Lotteries attract vast moral hazard and corruption because they look like free money. I never supported the idea and don't buy tickets, and think that worthy causes should be funded in the usual ways, through taxes, donations, memberships, sponsorships, premiums, etc. But this mini-editorial is unrelated to the point of the contest question.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Recently, I noted here and here the growth of "neurolaw," the - in my view often misguided - attempt to apply neuroscience to crime and punishment. I've since had a chance to read the excellent article by Michael S. Pardo and Dennis Patterson, "Philosophical Foundations of Law and Neuroscience", to be published in the University of Illinois Law Review in 2010. It provides an overview and critique of this growing field (and explains why it should shrink instead).

On a personal note, all this reminds me so much of Freudianism. Once upon a time, many years ago during an argument, an amateur Freudian psychologist informed me that my problems - as he perceived them - were due to the fact that I hated my mother.

I had never imagined that. How could I hate my mother and not even know it? Well, he explained, the hatred was in my Unconscious ....

So I solved the problem immediately by just disbelieving in the Freudian Unconscious. I continued to disbelieve and to not hate my mother, so far as I know and my behaviour would suggest, for another 45 years. Of course, it is possible I have a Freudian Unconscious somewhere in which I hate my mother, but it has had no impact on my life.

Today, the same person would announce instead that he had found a "hate Mom circuit" in my hippocampal gyrus, or something.

So no, I don't think neurolaw is any more scientific than Freud's Unconscious. Finding someone's fingerprints - and only his fingerprints, not anyone else's - on the steak knife used to stab another patron in a bar plus a security videocam catching him stabbing that guy, now that's what I mean by "scientific." I don't mind paying taxes for a criminal justice system that deals in that sort of evidence, but I am very skeptical of this "neurolaw" craze.

I've always thought neuroscience should stay as close to medicine as possible. In medicine, as Sir William Osler put it, you cure sometimes, alleviate often, and comfort always. So neuroscience would never be a weapon against anyone; it might help or might not help, in cases of strokes or mental disorders, for example, but the first principle of medicine, as Hippocrates used to say, is "First, do no harm."

Psychic phenomena: Persistent paradox

Reptile brain: Even reptiles don't have one, or not exactly, anyway

Baby bigots? Or adults who pay too much for fishwrap?

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Earlier this year Johan Bollen and colleagues from the Los Alamos National Laboratories unveiled a much-publicized 'Connections Map' that shows how researchers navigate online between science journals and those of other academic disciplines (1). With access to as many as 1 billion 'user interactions' from 35,000 journals in the natural sciences, social sciences and humanities, the study was unique in its sheer scale (1,2). Furthermore, unlike other such studies that have mined inter-article citations data (papers that cite each other) to map connections, the work carried out by Bollen and colleagues relied on up-to-date internet usage and navigation information supplied by reputable online publishers such as Elsevier and Thomson Scientific (2).

The work of Bollen's group appeared to be in every sense revolutionary. In their paper to PLOS One, for example, they drew attention to the rather biased nature of studies that use inter-article citations data, concluding that, "existing citations databases over-represent the natural sciences" (2). Other factors, such as the lengthy time that it takes for papers to get published, lent support to the claim that internet navigation provided a more temporally-accurate picture of traffic between journals. In contrast to citations data that focuses only on published authors, internet navigation information also reflects the activity of 'a larger community' that includes practicing scientists who do not necessarily publish (2).

In order to maximize the accuracy of their study Bollen and colleagues selected only those user interactions that involved requests for article abstracts or fully-published articles (2). The overall distribution of the interactions that they mapped ranged from 47 and 41 percent in the social and natural sciences respectively to 8 percent in the humanities (2). Bollen and colleagues were able to access individual 'click streams'- that is, temporal sequences that show how researchers navigated between journals. The resulting Connections Map classified journals into 'course-grained disciplines' such as cognitive science, architectural design, international studies, religion, music, geology and plant genetics to name but a few (2).

While the timing of interactions in such maps are accurate to the second, some still question whether internet navigation-based connections really provide valuable information on the future trends of cross-discipline navigation. Anthony van Raan, director of the Leiden Centre for Science and Technology Studies suggested that Bollen's approach may do nothing more than supply snapshots of current navigation fashions (1). Nevertheless data on such fashions can in itself be valuable for tracking "contemporary trends in scientific activity" and monitoring how such trends vary over time (1).

Bollen and colleagues admit that there is much work that can still be done (2). Future projects might include comparing connections maps with inter-article citations data, deconvoluting the different navigation patterns through which researchers move between journals and identifying the most influential journals in given areas of research (2). Indeed, if used correctly there is no denying that data from connections mapping could help improve the way online journals are made available to the research community.

Literature Cited
1. Declan, B. (2009) Web Usage Data Outline Map Of Knowledge. Nature News (accessed 3/23/3009).

2. Bollen, J. et al. (2009) Clickstream Data Yields High-Resolution Maps of Science. PLoS ONE 4, e4803.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, Breakpoint's Chuck Colson likes Steve Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009):

I'm going to warn you up front: Signature in the Cell is not light reading. If you are not conversant in molecular biology, you might feel a bit overwhelmed at times.

But this is a profound, hugely important book for anybody interested in the scientific debate of our times - the origins of life. I feel it's so important that we have posted an excerpt of the book at our website, BreakPoint.org, along with links to materials that will help you understand the main points of Signature in the Cell.

So what lies at the heart of Dr. Meyer's Signature in the Cell is the concept of information. And, as scientists have learned, the very building block of life - molecular DNA - is a vast storehouse of information. Information in the form of a four-character chemical alphabet that, when precisely arranged, provides the "instructions" for forming proteins and the structures that living cells need to survive.

Don't be intimidated. I am really glad that this concept is percolating down to the public because it is immensely important.

Darwin knew nothing of this, because the very concepts did not exist until World War II in Britain, when scientists were trying to figure out how to break Nazi code. His tax burden followers perpetuate his ignorance with simple, reductionist theories about how life develops, but it won't do you any good.

I'm still getting through Signature, not because it is especially difficult but because I must concurrently read a number of other books and materials.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and popular culture: Darwinists resort to whining when they are not popular (Also, this just in, water runs downhill)

David Berlinski: So that inconvenient math guy who lives in the oldest building in France is back?

Intellectual freedom in Canada: Inquisitor is now himself inquisitioned

Coffee!! Politician "gets" the design inference

Fan mail for Richard Dawkins from, of all places, New Scientist

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here are 100 Ivy League lectures I am told you shouldn't miss. Some of the science and medicine ones (#15-30) do look quite interesting. Anyway, whatever they provide is free.

Okay, okay, some of them may be missable. That is not my fault.

Also just up at Colliding Universes, my blog on theories about our universe:

Lynn Margulis challenges neo-Darwinists and teaches somewhere now - but she has
interesting ideas

Mars: The endless kvetch about life on Mars

My favourite science fiction author, Rob Sawyer, writes to say ...

Cosmology: Science's leader in things that don't make sense?

New podcasts on fine tuning of the universe

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

StephenB, at 50, won, for the appended comment in response to the question: Is accidental origin of life a doctrine that holds back science?

The prize? A free copy of Steven Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

The NOVA documentary The Incredible Journey Of The Butterflies, which aired on public television earlier this year, details a phenomenon that in recent years has captivated biologists worldwide- the North American Monarch butterfly's 2500 mile long migration to the Mexican Sierra Madre mountains. Both the sheer scale of the journey and the paucity of models in the scientific literature that adequately explain its evolutionary origins are plainly evident (1).

The late paleontologist Stephen Jay Gould took a rather nebulous stab at explicating the origins of another migratory feat- that of the green turtle's trans-Atlantic breeding trek from Brazil to the 'pinpoint of land' we now call Ascension Island (2). Having soundly carved up biologist Archie Carr's migratory drift hypothesis (which would have us believe that the migratory distance used to be much shorter and extended gradually as continents moved apart), Gould treated us to his own momentary reliance on obscurity. In Gould's words "the mechanism of turtle migration is so mysterious, that I see no barrier to supposing that turtles can be imprinted to remember the place of their birth without prior genetic information transmitted from previous generations" (2). It seems that for Gould at least, the bigger the evolutionary mystery, the more scope one would have for assuming what one wished to assume.

The rock pigeon, a favorite of Darwin's and a center piece in his treatise on artificial selection, uses the sun as a compass to get around (3-5). Equipped with an extraordinary capacity to perceive UV and polarized light, as well as a keen ability to detect the earth's magnetic fields, the rock pigeon is today considered to be a champion of directional orientation. As Fred Ryser noted in his textbook account, "the [pigeon's] sun compass employs the apparent movement of the sun along an arc across the sky -the ecliptic-during the day...On overcast days or when its capacity to see the sun is eliminated...the pigeon practices directional orientation by using geomagnetism...the pigeon's magnetic compass somehow senses [the] downward inclination in the magnetic field and the brain interprets it as north"(4). Underpinning such a phenomenal capability are numerous crystals of iron oxide that in the pigeon's brain align with the earth's magnetic field "like the iron needle in a compass" (5).

Just as remarkable is the Arctic Tern's aptitude for long distance precision flight. Flying in flocks of 12-25 individuals at altitudes of 30-150 meters, terns cover 40,000 km each year between their polar wintering and breeding quarters (6). One might assume that for these and other migratory birds, land masses en route could provide necessary resting points and navigational aids to keep them energized and on track. And yet some notable cases defy such a facile dismissal of the facts. The American golden plover, for example, can fly over the Atlantic from Canada to the northeastern coast of South America with sparse visual cues and without so much as a touchdown or a re-supply of food (7). Similarly, many ruby-throated hummingbirds fly 500 miles non-stop in their annual northward migration across the Gulf of Mexico. According to one review, such a compulsion to fly is ingrained in the very fabric of the young 'hummer': "there's no memory of past migrations, only an urge to put on a lot of weight and fly in a particular direction for a certain amount of time, then look for a good place to spend the winter" (8).

McGraw Hill's third edition of The Nature Of Life carried details of a study that confirmed the homing abilities of a long-winged seabird called the shearwater: "When experimenters transferred an individual shearwater...from its home in Great Britain to a new location in Massachusetts, the remarkable bird was back on its nest in 12 days, having crossed 4800 miles of trackless ocean" (5). Key experimental data corroborates the assertion that an established endogenous circannual clock is critical for ensuring appropriate pre-migratory fattening, moulting and reproduction. Writing on the common warbler, for example, Max Planck Institute's Eberhard Gwinner emphasized how "rhythmic waxing and waning of nocturnal [circannual activity]...is usually accompanied by variations in migratory fattening (indicated by an increase in body mass) and followed by a moult in winter and a phase of reproductive activity in summer" (9). Most remarkable of all is the finding that the circannual clock is responsible for setting not only the timing but also direction and duration of migration (9). Day length (or photoperiod) provides a critical trigger for getting migration started (9).

How might evolutionary processes have given rise to migratory behaviors? In their book Nature's IQ, Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi are candidly open about their view on the matter- natural selection could not have been the operative mechanism (10). The exactitude of food intake relative to energy expenditure for trans-oceanic birds forms an important platform upon which they develop their rationale- too much food prior to becoming airborne and levels of body fat would be incompatible with effective flying (9). Too little food and the fat reserves would be insufficient for completion of the journey. The end result would be an almost certain death, perhaps an out of control plunge into the merciless seas below. Hornyansky's and Tasi's swathing attack on the evolutionists' 'non-answer' appeals to our deepest intuitions. Analogizing bird migration to human feats of navigation they write:

"Many [innate] complex abilities must be simultaneously present for migratory birds to perform such impressive feats, and these abilities and knowledge have to work in perfect harmony. If we want to climb the highest peak of the Himalayas, Mount Everest, we have to create a detailed plan to be able to reach our goal. It would be foolish to think that merely by a series of fortunate accidents, in time we will suddenly find ourselves there. Not only do we have to make an all-encompassing plan, but we also have to execute every detail of it. If we disregard just a single factor...our undertaking, despite all our efforts, could end in failure. The migratory system of birds, too, is able to function only in its entirety, and the superficial assumptions about its 'gradual evolution' get caught in the filter of logical thinking" (10).

Those in favor of evolution's ways openly struggle to understand the selective advantage afforded by the migratory birds' seemingly deliberate draining of precious resources. By their own admission "Migration exacts a high toll [as] grizzlies wait in streams and gorge on exhausted salmon migrating home from the sea, and falcons feast on fatigued songbirds arriving at their winter home in Africa. Fuel used by muscles to propel wings, fins, and legs is unavailable for reproductive activities, and time spent on the move is time not spent gathering food" (5). They counter their self-imposed quandary by assuming a priori that selection 'favors the brave' and that over time survival benefits must have outweighed such costs. Evolution is after all a 'fact' and so what must have happened must have happened. Such circular reasoning of course gets us nowhere and leaves the above functional challenges unanswered. In short, evolutionists are today caught in their own Gouldean-style reliance on obscurity.

Literature Cited
1. Robert Deyes (2009), Questioning The Role Of Gene Duplication-Based Evolution In Monarch Migration, Access Research Network, See http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2009/03/01/questioning_the_role_of_gene_duplication.

2. Stephen Jay Gould (1992), The Panda's Thumb- More Reflections In Natural History, Published by W.W Norton and Company, New York, pp.31-34.

3. Charles Darwin (1859), The Origin of Species By Means of Natural Selection Or The Preservation of Favored Races In the Struggle For Survival, Modern Library Paperbacks Edition (1998), New York, p.42.

4. Fred A Ryser Jr (1985), Birds Of the Great Basin: A Natural History, University Of Nevada Press, pp.290-291.

5. John H Postlethwait and Janet L. Hopson (1991), The Nature Of Life, 3rd Edition, McGraw Hill, New York, pp.922-923.

6. Gudmundur A. Gudmundsson, Thomas Alerstami, Bertil Larsson (1992), Radar observations of northbound migration of the Arctic tern,Sterna paradisaea, at the Antarctic Peninsula, Antarctic Science, Volume 4, pp. 163-170.

7. See American Golden Plover 'Fact Sheet' On The National Wildlife Federation Site http://www.nwf.org/birdsandglobalwarming/birdprofile.cfm?bird=American+Golden-Plover.

8. See Hummingbirds.Net at http://www.hummingbirds.net/migration.html.

9. Eberhard Gwinner (1996), Circadian And Circannual Programs In Avian Migration, The Journal of Experimental Biology, Volume 199, pp.39-48.

10. Istvan Tasi and Balazs Hornyanszky (2009), Nature's IQ: Extraordinary Animal Behaviors That Defy Evolution, Torchlight Publishing, Badger, CA, pp.93-94

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

"Grr. Sniff. Arf.", Cathleen Shine's review of Inside of a Dog:, by Alexandra Horowitz, tries to help us understand doggy minds:

In one enormously important variation from wolf behavior, dogs will look into our eyes. “Though they have inherited some aversion to staring too long at eyes, dogs seem to be predisposed to inspect our faces for information, for reassurance, for guidance.” They are staring, soulfully, into our umwelts [trying to understand our view of the world and how it affects them]. It seems only right that we try a little harder to reciprocate, and Horowitz’s book is a good step in that direction.

Not that examining eyes always provides an answer:

Dogs respond to baby talk “partially because it distinguishes speech that is directed at them from the rest of the continuous yammering above their heads.”

Yes, that is just the problem for the dog. He simply does not know what is happening in human society most of the time because he has not mastered the facility of language. My favourite cartoon for demonstrating that fact, anthropomorphically, was one in which a dog, driven downtown in a car, yaps happily out the window to his neighbour's dog, "Hey, they're taking me to the vet to be [tutored]!"

Sometimes it is a blessing for them, of course. An irrecoverably sick animal does not know that his people have humanely decided on euthanasia. That was always a comfort to me when I signed vets' releases to have beloved cats put down. The cats never knew and never could know, and could not understand why those decisions were made: Any other possible future would be too hard for an animal with their limited intellectual resources to manage.

See also: More animal mind stories at The Mindful Hack.

Animal minds: Are dogs or wolves smarter?

Hack gets mail: Physicist writes on abuse of spirituality to promote causes

More on neurolaw: The brain as a cement cast?

Neurolaw: Your flawed brain takes the rap

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Recently, we asked Uncommon Descent Contest Question 8: Do the "new atheists" help or hurt the cause of Darwinism?

The new atheists' impact in general is often debated. What exactly have they contributed to atheism? Many traditional atheists or their sympathizers think not much. Bryon R. McCane, Professor of Religion at Wofford College, asks,

Has something gone wrong with the new atheism? For awhile, it was really on a roll. Several best-selling books aggressively attacked religion, calling it a "delusion" (Richard Dawkins), and a "spell" (Daniel Dennett) that "poisons everything" (Christopher Hitchens). Bill Maher's movie "Religulous" warned that humankind must get rid of religion or die. New atheism looked like the wave of the future. But not anymore. "Religulous" got mixed reviews and disappeared quickly. Rebuttals to Dawkins, Dennett and Hitchens have appeared, culminating with Karen Armstrong's new book, The Case for God. Sales of atheist books have fallen off the charts, literally. Months have gone by since one appeared on the best-seller list.

To me, the key problem was that they had a new level of hate, not a new idea. I wrote about that here.

Winner announcement: Jerry at 91. I especially enjoyed this observation:

There is an old maxim in marketing. Nothing kills a bad product faster than extensive advertising and good distribution. The faster people realize how bad a product is, the quicker it is rejected. The new atheist movement has accelerated the communication and distribution of their product but in the process open themselves up for intense scrutiny.

I must arrange for more prizes, as I would have liked to offer StephenB and Adel DiBagno a prize for their entertaining and useful discussion; however, I have only five copies of Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), hardcover, and if I burn through 60% of them in one contest, the publisher might not be very anxious to help me restock.

Jerry, I need a snail address for you.

I am a bit behind, judging contests, due to unrelated uproars. But here are the entries that seemed, to me at least, to shed light: Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Review Of The Sixth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell, by Stephen Meyer

Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

A sound approach to scientific investigation does not necessarily bring with it a mandatory requirement to be a 'nose to the grindstone' experimentalist. Indeed scientists can and often do take data that others have amassed and interpret it in light of their own understanding of the matter at hand. Therein lies a lesson that, as science historians will note, is backed by an impressive list of prominent cases. In fact Albert Einstein, Isaac Newton and even Charles Darwin challenged the viewpoints of their day through their own theoretical interpretations of reality. For Darwin this meant for the most part collecting data from botanists, breeders, ecologists, and paleontologists and constructing a paradigm-shifting synthesis on the evolution of life that did not necessarily hinge on his own data. Both Einstein's two papers on relativity and Newton's opus Principia were theoretical manifestos that at the time they were published had little experimental support.

In recent years followers of the Intelligent Design (ID) movement have been called to task over their own perceived lack of direct involvement in experimentation. Stephen Meyer observes that ID's fiercest critics dismiss these same followers as being less than qualified to engage in scientific debate because of their presumed absence from experimental science. And yet in light of what we know about the influences of Einstein, Newton and Darwin one might be excused for countering that such criticisms hardly seem justifiable. Truth be told the Discovery Institute, a key ID nerve center, today supports a facility where scientists are actively involved in laboratory-based research.

As the director of the Center for Science & Culture at the Discovery Institute, Meyer has been personally exposed to a barrage of anti-ID hostility, evidenced for example in his televised encounters with prominent self-asserting secularists such as Eugenie Scott and Michael Shermer. But as Meyer makes clear, his own exposure to anti-ID sentiments extends back much further to his days as a graduate at Cambridge. With the exception of a handful of notable scientists, few at the time were willing to acknowledge ID as a serious alternative to the deeply-entrenched Darwinian orthodoxy.

One might be excused for feeling somewhat baffled by such a reluctance to embrace design in light of the Judeo-Christian framework upon which modern science owes its origins. Others before Meyer have made this point (1). Two years ago, for example, zoologist and biophysicist Jeff Hardin brought the Judeo-Christian influence on science to the attention of his audience during the Science And Christianity conference in Madison, WI (2). According to Hardin historical icons such as Robert Boyle, Johannes Kepler and Newton himself saw the reliability and intelligibility of nature as "testifying to God's glory". Quoting from Nobel Laureate Melvin Calvin's Chemical Evolution, Hardin concluded that "[the Hebrew] monotheistic view seems to be the historical foundation for modern science" (2).

But it is in citing the relevance of a non-religious form of these foundations to ID that Meyer supplies a fresh and unparryable case against those who out of hand wish to exclude ID from scientific circles. His closing remarks on how the singular actions of intelligent agents parallel sudden events in biology, notably the origin of life, draw on inferences made by Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen in their exemplary text The Mystery Of Life's Origins (3). In short, one can no longer deny that the design premise represents a foundational 'cross beam' for contemporary science.

Literature Cited
1.Nancy R. Pearcey and Charles B. Thaxton (1994), The Soul of Science- Christian Faith and Natural Philosophy, Crossway Books, Wheaton, IL, pp.17-42

2.Jeff Hardin (2007), Thinking Bibically About Nature And The Nature Of Science, in Science And Christianity: Friends Or Foes?; Conference held on the 24th March, 2007, Blackhawk Church, Madison, WI

3.Charles Thaxton, Walter Bradley and Roger Olsen (1984), The Mystery of Life's Origin Reassessing Current Theories, Published by Lewis and Stanley, Dallas, Texas

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

On this episode of ID the Future, acclaimed author and Discovery Institute senior fellow David Klinghoffer takes a look at the academic freedom — or lack thereof — for scientists who support intelligent design, scientists who are forced to don disguises and go underground in order to protect their careers.

This podcast is based on Mr. Klinghoffer's commentary in Townhall Magazine, "Evolution's Glass Ceiling."

Go here to listen.

[From Denyse: Yeah, tell me about it. I hear this stuff all the time. It was hilarious to hear people insisting that the Expelled film was false at the same time as expulsions continue, with their approval I suspect. It is hard for materialists to accept a genuine challenge. They are used to continued tactical retreats, usually from well-meaning tenured theists who hope to be treated nicely. Not a chance, if you go by the "new atheists." But things are slowly changing.]

The other podcasts:

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 2: Rebutting Methodological Materialism: Interview With Angus Menuge, Part Two

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 3: Agents Under Fire: Part One With Angus Menuge

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 4: Hitler's Ethic and the Pursuit of Evolutionary Progress in Nazi Policy

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 5: Seeking God in Science: An Atheist
Defends Intelligent Design

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy 6: Back to school with real science

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This very interesting article by Steve Silberman in Wired ("Placebos Are Getting More Effective. Drugmakers Are Desperate to Know Why," 08.24.09) notes

True, many test subjects treated with the medication felt their hopelessness and anxiety lift. But so did nearly the same number who took a placebo, a look-alike pill made of milk sugar or another inert substance given to groups of volunteers in clinical trials to gauge how much more effective the real drug is by comparison. The fact that taking a faux drug can powerfully improve some people's health - the so-called placebo effect - has long been considered an embarrassment to the serious practice of pharmacology.

Ultimately, Merck's foray into the antidepressant market failed. In subsequent tests, MK-869 turned out to be no more effective than a placebo. In the jargon of the industry, the trials crossed the futility boundary.

MK-869 wasn't the only highly anticipated medical breakthrough to be undone in recent years by the placebo effect. From 2001 to 2006, the percentage of new products cut from development after Phase II clinical trials, when drugs are first tested against placebo, rose by 20 percent. The failure rate in more extensive Phase III trials increased by 11 percent, mainly due to surprisingly poor showings against placebo. Despite historic levels of industry investment in R and D, the US Food and Drug Administration approved only 19 first-of-their-kind remedies in 2007 - the fewest since 1983 - and just 24 in 2008. Half of all drugs that fail in late-stage trials drop out of the pipeline due to their inability to beat sugar pills.

More:

After decades in the jungles of fringe science, the placebo effect has become the elephant in the boardroom.

Although longish, this article is indispensable in understanding the damage that materialism and mechanism has done to medicine. The placebo effect should never have been either a problem or an embarrassment. It only became so because of a need to pretend that the patient's mind does not matter, because mind is an illusion created by the buzz of neurons in the brain and causes nothing. Well, they are paying for their mistake now.

The good news is that a new approach is developing, one that harnesses both the placebo response and pharmaceuticals. As Silberman says,

The placebo response doesn't care if the catalyst for healing is a triumph of pharmacology, a compassionate therapist, or a syringe of salt water. All it requires is a reasonable expectation of getting better. That's potent medicine.

Of course, that means that the mind is doing the heavy lifting, but never mind. If you're better, you're better. You want to complain about that? Save it for when you are sick and not getting better.

Go here for the rest.

See also:

Can ideas be reduced to purely material causes?

Neuroscience: Where does it hurt? How?

Finally, an idea! Wow, a real idea. But wait, wait

Brain: If a pill did not cause all your problems, chance are a pill will not fix them all either

Health can sometimes be fun, free, and painless: The placebo effect gets its own Web site

Placebo effect: Your mind's role in your health

Mindand medicine: Did your doctor just prescribe you a quarter teaspoon of coloured sugar?

Beauregard and O'Leary on the Dennis Prager show: A partial transcript

If you do not take your sugar pill placebo are you more likely to die?

Also just up at The Mindful Hack:

href="http://mindfulhack.blogspot.com/2009/09/mario-beauregard-on-neuroscience-of.html" target="another">Neuroscience of Spirituality"

Big mystery: Why you feel sick when doctors tell you you are

Humans are unique - get used to it, or get therapy. Do NOT get a chimpanzee

But you're not nearly smart enough to tell me how to run my life

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Review Of The Fifth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell By Stephen Meyer
By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Amidst the many memories that I cherish from my college undergraduate years are the get-togethers that friends and I would have to discuss the core textbook principles of molecular biology. Benjamin Lewin's Genes IV stands out as one of the treasured resources we would pour over as we searched for the facts on the makeup of life. Perhaps most often visited amongst our topics of discussion were those of eukaryotic transcription and translation principally because for all of us there was something deeply unsettling about the naturalistic foundations upon which the emergence of these processes had been presented. So unsettled were we that we could never quite swallow the evolutionary suppositions that accompanied the factual details.

To recapitulate on what we now know about transcription, eukaryotes are furnished with three different RNA polymerases differing primarily in the types of genes that they transcribe. Each RNA Polymerase binds to a class of DNA sequence known as a promoter from which transcription then begins (1). A number of proteins called transcription factors, upon which these polymerases are absolutely dependent, form a functional transcription 'apparatus'. RNA Polymerase II for example requires at least four transcription factors, TFIIA, TFIIB, TFIID and TFIIE for activity - a fact that is self-evident in Stephen Meyer's pictorial outlines in the fifth chapter of his book Signature In The Cell.

The first step in the formation of the transcription apparatus involves the binding of TFIID to a DNA sequence upstream of the promoter's own TATA box. TFIIA and TFIIB are then incorporated into the complex allowing RNA Polymerase II to bind to its recognition sequence in the DNA together with TFIIE (1). The functional interdependence of these molecules of course limits the amount of genetic change that can be tolerated by any one of the genes that codes for them. After all, any structural change in any one of the transcription factors would have to be accompanied by concerted changes in other factors within the complex as well as the RNA Polymerase II itself if functionality were to be maintained. This latter point, as relates to functional molecular complexes in general, was heavily emphasized in a seminal paper on Cambrian fauna by Meyer et al in 2001 (2).

In thinking of eukaryotic transcription I am reminded of Alexandre Dumas' three musketeers who, like eukaryotic RNA polymerases, acted in unison in their endeavors. Ribosomal RNAs transcribed by RNA Polymerase I form part of the very ribosomes that then translate messenger RNAs, the latter having been transcribed by RNA Polymerase II. Similarly transfer RNAs (tRNAs), products of RNA Polymerase III, play their role in assuring the correct incorporation of amino acids during translation. Living up to the axiom 'Un Pour Tous', RNA Polymerases can be considered as the three chevaliers of the molecular realm.

As one reads Meyer's summary of how the mechanistic details of transcription and translation were first unraveled, one cannot help but notice the amount of theoretical ground work that had been laid out before the first experimental results began rolling in. Contravening the ideas initially put forward by 'Tie Club' physicist George Gammow (see my review on the exploits of the Tie Club, Ref 3), Crick realized that the inherent structure of DNA could not in itself account for the amino acid sequence of proteins. In Meyer's words "there is nothing about the chemical properties of the bases in DNA (or those in mRNA) that favors forming a chemical bond with any specific amino acid over another" (p.130). There had to exist a code embedded within but existing independently of DNA's structural layout.

Francis Crick realized early on in his career that if DNA were to function as a code, it would require a series of adapter molecules that could in some way mirror the 'letters' or codons in the DNA sequence. Such molecules were later identified as transfer RNAs each of which we now know is coupled to a specific amino acid as a result of the activities of specialized enzymes called tRNA synthetases. Intermediate between DNA and proteins are messenger RNAs- transcripts of the code-rich sequence of DNA that migrate from the nucleus to the cytoplasm where ribosomes are ready in waiting to begin translation.

To this day seemingly unanswerable questions on the evolution of transcription and translation mechanisms continue to rattle the Darwin-faithful. As noted in an earlier review, gradually evolving the genetic code to provide the full complement of amino acid coding triplets would be lethal before it were beneficial simply because such alterations would impact the very proteins that make up the translation machinery (4). Along these same lines, biophycist Paul Davies famously remarked that "a change in the code risks feeding back into the very translation machinery that implements it, leading to a catastrophic feedback of errors that would wreck the whole process. To have accurate translation, the cell must first translate accurately"(5).

Meyer's expository talent is visible in his extension of these same principles to other cellular processes such as DNA replication. Meyer fleshes out a cohesive argument in support of intelligent design garnering support from an extensive body of molecular evidence and expert commentaries. His review of the 'chicken and egg' paradox, as relates to the integral interdependencies of molecular systems such as transcription and translation, highlights once more why it is that evolutionary 'pie in the sky' assumptions are powerless to explain the origins of critical life processes.

Literature Cited
1. Benjamin Lewin(1990), Genes IV, Oxford Cell Press, 4th Edition pp. 543-546

2. Stephen C. Meyer, P. A. Nelson, and Paul Chien (2001), The Cambrian Explosion: Biology's Big Bang, http://www.discovery.org/articleFiles/PDFs/Cambrian.pdf pp.34-35

3. Twenty Men In Matching Ties, And The Eternal Mystery Of The World's Comprehensibility
http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2008/09/07/twenty_men_in_matching_ties_and_the_eter

4. The Pioneers We Cherish: Reviewing The Achievements Of 'Origins' Biology, http://www.arn.org/blogs/index.php/2/2008/08/06/the_pioneers_we_cherish_reviewing_the_ac

5. Paul Davies (1999), The Fifth Miracle: The Search for the Origin and The Meaning of Life, Published by Simon and Schuster, New York, p.111

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Forget rabbits and hats: Design theorist Mike Behe disappears and then reappears on Bloggingheads.

I've just been through the weirdest book-related experience I've had since a Canadian university professor with a loaded rat trap chased me around after a talk I gave a dozen years ago, threatening to spring it on me.

Apparently, vitriol over this interview caused Behe's discussion partner John McWhorter to ask that it be removed.

He wrote primly,

"John McWhorter feels, with regret, that this interview represents neither himself, Professor Behe, nor Bloggingheads usefully, takes full responsibility for same, and has asked that it be taken down from the site. He apologizes to all who found its airing objectionable."

This is astounding. McWhorter was there, he said what he did, so how can he claim that it doesn't represent him?

A day later, the show was back up. So the Darwin thugs lost that round.

Behe writes,

Well, mobs, including internet mobs, are scary things, and it's understandable to panic when they unexpectedly show up at your door. But if you’re going to set up a website to air discussions about contentious issues of the day, you should have a whole lot more guts than displayed by Bloggingheads TV.

Better see it while you can though.

Also just up at the Post-Darwinist:

More coffee please!! Darwinism and popular culture: If this is love, please hate me instead

From the mailbox: Competition in nature is overrated

All this just happens when you add water and stir (spectacular scanning electron microscope images)

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Darwinism and pop culture: Pop fiction discovers the Discovery Institute

Darwinism and pop culture: So now it's Darwin poems

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Special invitation for Richard Dawkins - but any civil person is entitled to enter.

There's been some discussion here and elsewhere whether the the recent IEEE article by Dembski and Marks correctly) characterizes Richard Dawkins' famous METHINKS IT IS LIKE A WEASEL program.

Does the program ratchet correct letters or does it let them vary? One is a partitioned or stair-step search, the other a more realistic evolutionary search. From The Blind Watchmaker, where Dawkins describes the program, its performance suggests that it could be either of these options (though he doesn't say).

On the other hand, from a video-run of the program, (go to 6:15), it seems to be the latter.

It's easy enough to settle this question: Make the code for the program public.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

For a free copy of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009), help me understand the following:

Accidental origin of life is the basic thesis of origin of life researchers. Life all just somehow sort of happened one day, billions of years ago, under the right conditions - which we may be able to recreate. But there is a constant, ongoing dispute about just what those conditions were.

Here is the problem I have always had with accidental origin of life: It amounts to spontaneous generation. However, banishing the doctrine of spontaneous generation played a key role in modern medicine's success. If we assume that life forms (for medical purposes, we focus on pathogens) cannot start spontaneously, then they must have been introduced. Hence, we can develop procedures for a sterile operating room or lab.

If life can be spontaneously generated, why isn't it happening now? Conditions for life today are probably as good as they have ever been, and maybe better. For over 500 million years they have obviously been good for complex life forms, and for billions of years they have been good for simple ones.

Go here to enter.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Synopsis Of The Fourth Chapter Of Nature's IQ By Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

As an avid participant of the compass-based sport of orienteering in the 1980s, one of the roles I was frequently assigned to was that of 'course designer'. Meeting the needs of the many orienteering enthusiasts who turned up on competition day was a formidable task that required the cooperative efforts of a large number of individuals. Errors in communicating course layout or map design could have been navigationally disastrous for all concerned. Of course few of us need reminding of nature's own 'grand schemes' of cooperative synchrony epitomized in the colonies of over eleven thousand ant species that today grace our planet. Workers, soldiers, fertilizing males and queens 'play their instruments' in an orchestra that is in part directed by the activity of a family of molecules called pherormones.

In all, entomologists have identified a staggering thirty pherormones used by ant cohorts for transmitting precise messages between specialized groups, on everything from the whereabouts of food to the imminence of danger. The resulting functional inter-dependency amongst ants is all too evident in even the broadest brushstroke accounts of their activities:

"Ants have to have mandibles suitable for cutting leaves; they have to know that their business is to carry pieces of inedible leaves into the anthill; they have to know that once in the anthill, they [must] chew and spread the substrate...they have to have an appropriate system of communication to be able to carry out their mass operations (they can completely rob a tree of its foliage in a single day)...Before her mating flight, the future queen puts a bit of the home mushroom crop in her buccal pocket and leaves the anthill with it. In her new hole, she begins to nurse this culture, which will then serve the sustenance of the new anthill..Further complicating this picture is the fact that even within a single ant species, there are often several types of groups with completely different bodily structures and tasks...mutually dependent on one another" (p.64)

How might such a system of functionally interdependent units have evolved piecemeal? In keeping with the Gouldean realization of the predominance of stasis in the fossil record, the latest evidence unequivocally shows ant colony organization having remained largely unchanged over the last 60 million years- a bludgeoning blow to Darwin's step-by-step evolutionary axiom if ever there was one. Those choosing to clutch on to Darwinist dogma remain clueless about how today's specialized ants evolved from some ill-defined primordial insect from a bygone era. After all, the all-or-nothing aspects of ant colony communicative living make each member's efficient fulfillment of assigned roles in everything from mushroom growing to ground defense critical for the survival of the colony as a whole.

Anthills aside, examples of functional inter-dependencies in nature abound, the electric eel perhaps being the next hot favorite. Equipped as it is with sophisticated electricity emitting and receiving organs that serve to transmit signals with its close neighbors, this formidable creature sports a thick fatty layer that affords vital protection against the dangers of self-electrocution. While the summer sounds of crickets similarly function to locate mating partners, bees use a sun-oriented '8' dance to inform their hives of the precise whereabouts of food. For the eel, the cricket and the bee both the accompanying perception 'apparatus' and the brain regions that help decode the incoming signal are indispensable parts of their respective communication systems. Without them all would be lost.

Fish stand out as perhaps the most surprising of all animals in their use of acoustics. Several species are known for their grunting, croaking, growling and humming-style vibrations often identifiably directed at their own kind. Individuals of the same species have to carry an innate capacity to deconvolute the relevant species-specific sounds from the cacophony of noises that shroud their environs. In this regard, one has to stretch the imagination to claim that per chance the frequency range of sound emission would simply match up with that of sound detection in any given species. Australian biologist Michael Denton hammered home a similar message in his book Nature's Destiny over a decade ago.

For the collective sum of case studies outlined in Nature's IQ Hornyanszky and Tasi are unswervingly steadfast in asserting that the origin of "species-specific communication systems" remains outside the bounds of gradual evolutionary change. With a sense of irony they justifiably question today's received wisdom: "when did members of different...species carry on conciliatory discussions in order to be able to understand messages of fellow members of the same species?". In reality, for the Darwinian mechanism to hold true numerous mutations would have had to appear in multiple, geographically proximal individuals if all were to speak and understand the same 'language'. This unlikely state of affairs, coupled with the finding that an invariable repertoire of communicable sounds and visible signals exists amongst members of the same species, provides the fodder needed to bolster the case against blind evolution and in favor of intelligent design.

When the ancients wrote of ants as "[wise] creatures of little strength" (Pvbs 30 vs 25), they clearly understood the sophistication in their capacity to work together for the common good of a larger whole. Today science has extended such observations and brought into sharp focus a world replete with communication systems that defy the Darwinian paradigm. Biologists would do well to take note.

For more information and to order Nature's IQ go to http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/php/book_show_item.php?id=129

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's my MercatorNet column about the decline of traditional media (known to bloggers as "legacy mainstream media"). Anyone interested in the intelligent design controversy should think carefully about how the media are changing.

I don't accept the thesis that the old media declined because they were partisan. Rather they became more ridiculously partisan as they were declining.

Single-minded partisanship is - in a free society - usually an outcome of consumer choice. People can get their news from lots of sources. So if they choose your source, you can develop the story as you like.

But - by contrast - how many air traffic controllers are permitted to bug pilots with their opinions about politics and religion? How many weather forecasters would last long if they likewise bugged farmers seeking data on the tornado watch?

So the tsunami of consumer choices in media fuels partisanship - but also opportunity.

The decline of big legacy media means the decline of the Big Controlling Story. You know - four legs good, two legs bad - as George Orwell put it, immortally, in Animal Farm. The story that writes itself for the 12:00 pm deadline, and no one gives a moment's thought to possibilities like:

1. It's not as simple as that.
2. Things may have changed.
3. The old guys might be wrong.
4. We may need to add to our panel of reliable experts (and maybe drop some).

The decline of the tired old Darwin lobby sources in favour of broader ones can certainly help the intelligent design theorists get a fairer hearing.

For more, go here.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

The overthrow of Darwinism - in real life, forget the pop science media

How can you lose playing tic tac toe with a pigeon? Don't watch the board. (You can be sure he will.)

Okay, I did it again ... Blew my stack ...

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Apparently, the New York Times, on which there is a death watch - along with its acquisition , the Boston Globe dumped Ben Stein, the key sponsor of the Expelled movie, as a columnist. They must have been just waiting to do that. Supposedly, there was a conflict of interest. Personally, I think he is better off without them, as well as versa vice.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Coffee!! Oh, so now Darwinism explains why you think SHE'S beautiful? Where's my rolling pin?

Ken Miller and Darwin's god

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The prize?: A free copy of Stephen Meyer's Signature in the Cell (Harper One, 2009).

Go here to enter.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Synopsis Of The Fourth Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

When talking about 'information' and its relevance to biological design, Intelligent Design theorists have a particular definition in mind. Indeed they see information as "the attribute inherent in and communicated by alternative sequences or arrangements of something that produce specific effects" (p.86). When the twentieth century American mathematician Claude Shannon laid down his own theory for quantifying information he drew attention to a mathematical relationship that on its surface appeared intuitive. Information as Shannon noted was inversely proportional to uncertainty. That is, the more information we had about our world the less uncertainty there was over the outcome of future events. Shannon also proposed that the more improbable an event the more information such an event would impart once it actually took place (say, throwing a six on a role of dice).

Nevertheless Shannon's theory was deficient in at least one crucial aspect- it made no distinction between meaningful and meaningless information-rich strings. While equally long sequences of alphabetical characters did not always elicit tangible (meaningful) outcomes, they nevertheless always displayed the same level of Shannon-style uncertainty. And yet language in itself was more than a random assortment of letters even though Shannon's theory ascribed the same degree of information content to such an assortment as it did to an equally long but meaningful series of sentences.

What was missing in Shannon's synthesis was a term that accounted for the so-called 'specificity', that is the "precise arrangement or sequence" of letters in, say, human language (p. 100). Therein lay a biological connection. After all, the swinging 50s brought with it a host of scientific breakthroughs, notably those of X-ray crystallographers Fred Sanger and John Kendrew who were instrumental in unveiling the 'twisted, turning, tangled chain' nature of proteins. In so doing they sewed the seeds for a process of discovery that would eventually culminate in an unexpected realization- proteins contained a high degree of structural and sequence specificity. That is, if proteins were to fulfill their hugely diverse repertoire of functions in the cell both their structural organization and amino acid sequence had to fit within a very narrow subset of all possible arrangements. Just like human language that only takes on meaning when letters and words are set out in universally recognizable and interpretable sequences, proteins could be considered as being rich in specified information.

In 1958 Francis Crick's Sequence Hypothesis formalized the idea that protein amino acid sequences were inextricably linked to the base sequences of DNA. Years earlier, geneticists George Beadle and Edward Tatum had supplied evidence that strongly suggested a link between genes and proteins. The elucidation of the DNA genetic code in the 1960s, defining the base triplets that coded for each amino acid, revolutionized the molecular biology arena. Most significant of all was the revelation that both DNA and proteins bore the same 'specificity' fingerprint as human systems of code. In short, the cellular world appeared to be intelligently designed.

In the fourth chapter of Signature In The Cell, Stephen Meyer displays an enviable clarity in his exposition of biology's post-'Shannon information' era. In so doing he masterfully dispels any concern that the intelligent design inference does not carry with it a sound logical foundation.

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here is my latest MercatorNet article, dissecting the caveman theory of psychology, explaining why evolutionary psychology is so rapidly losing credibility:

“Is human behaviour really based on the survival strategies of our Pleistocene ancestors?”

Well, the stone hatchet is certainly poised over our iconic cavemen. A recent Scientific American podcast admits as much, and without the narrator throwing a panic attack either.

Why this? Why now? And why such equinamity?

Secular materialist thinkers have as deep a desire as anyone to understand the wellsprings of human nature. But they are much more restricted in where they can look. From the very beginning of the organized "human evolution" movement, starting with Darwin's publication of The Descent of Man, they have mined random findings from evolution for deep truths about human nature.

So what went so wrong, so badly, and so soon?

Go here for more and for the links, and great Flintstones graphics.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Friend Regis Nicoll notes a 1986 study that supposedly shows that atheists are smarter. As the "new atheist" movement gets ink and hits the airwaves, we could have predicted more of this.

A friend writes,

More poor science here. All that they can point to is a negative correlation between belief in God and level of education. Additionally, they appear to point to a stronger correlation between self-identification as a 'scientist.' They cannot say from this that "higher IQ causes atheism." Other potential explanations are that there are subtle, and not-so-subtle, influences that take place during the higher educational process that is aimed at eliminating faith.

Indeed, I have known a number of people who point to college professors talking about evolution as a negative turning point in their faith. During grad school I heard professors state directly that more educated and intelligent people know there is no God. The underlying message is, if you believe in God you are ignorant, uneducated, and dense.

Unfortunately, many students are unprepared to question the authority of these professors who are socializing them to be an "intellectual elite" according to their own standards.

What's missing from most such "studies" is the recognition that when the elite culture is materialist atheist - or materialist atheist for all practical purposes, despite insincere claims - people who really espouse those views, whether or not they are more intelligent, will be far more likely to get ahead.

Intelligence has nothing directly to do with outcomes like that. In any society, there is a pool of intelligent people - people who know how to do things - who can be, and are, recruited for all kinds of new and interesting enterprises - good or bad. And there are people who can't, especially if they don't agree with the cause in question. And a number of the latter will die. As we have discovered over the last 250 years.

Also just up at the Mindful Hack, my blog on neuroscience and spirituality:

Neuroscience and spirituality: Subversive Thinking blog's interview with me (text)

Genetics and popular culture: Another claim that genes "explain" religion

Evolutionary psychology: Forget that. If you want to be attractive, be NICE!

Evolutionary psychology: Good news, at last, for credit card companies!

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Synopsis Of The Third Chapter Of Nature's IQ By Balazs Hornyanszky and Istvan Tasi
ISBN 978-0-9817273-0-1
By Robert Deyes
ARN Correspondent

Commensalism, mutualism and symbiosis are terms that budding biologists are all too familiar with by the time they begin their university careers. We all learn about the cooperativity that exists amongst many of our world's creatures and the benefits they can reap from each other's presence. Goliath groupers that open their mouths to cleaning 'minions' such as the blue-streak cleaner wrasse defy deeply held expectations of nature's ways as do sharks that extend their vicious jaws to pilot fish that then pick out food remnants from between their teeth.

Extraordinary from a predatory perspective is the finding that wrasses and pilot fish are rarely (if ever) eaten by their much larger hosts. Discussions on the evolution of such partnerships leave the non-expert believing that chance mutations could simply turn predator 'fearers' into predator 'lovers' that naturally bond with their otherwise mortal enemies. Evolutionists weigh in by further supposing that reciprocal mutations led these same enemies to offer VIP treatments to their tasty servants.

Hornyanszky and Tasi nevertheless spare little in their decrial of the evolutionists' hand-waving ideals. In their own un-minced words "it is nonsensical to suggest that, because of chance mutations, a small fish would suddenly approach a predator without inhibitions with the idea of getting food from its mouth...and that the former predator and prey would then propagate generations of fish that continued this symbiotic relationship" (p.47).

Symbiotic partnerships are of course hot favorites for television naturalists eager to spread their own vision of a world where faunal allegiances are mere products of an overarching process of evolutionary adaptation. No more so than for the Egyptian plover and the voracious Nile crocodile both of which have featured prominently in many a natural history documentary. The plover's shrieking call, which signals the whereabouts of a potential meal, is an invaluable asset for the Nile crocodile as are the rich, bite-sized pickings on its own skin that supply the plover with its daily food rations.

Other partnerships can be vitally indispensable for the parties concerned. With its own cohort of formic acid-spraying weaver ants, the centaur oakblue caterpillar for example is dutifully protected from its enemies. Without them it would be hopelessly vulnerable. In turn the caterpillar supplies ants with a rich sweet milk, attracting them to its bounty through vibrations and special scents that they can quickly recognize.

Devotees of Pixar's animated blockbuster Finding Nemo will no doubt tell of the symbiotic lifestyles that unite both the clownfish and the sea anemone. While the anemone's stinging tentacles are of little consequence to the adult clownfish because of its protective gelatinous coat, the young unprotected fry relies on its instinctive 'cautious first' approach to avoid the deadly stings of its newly-found roommate.

And yet the seemingly intractable problem that Hornyanszky and Tasi repeatedly draw attention to in their own consideration of the facts is that of how the integrated cooperativity so visible in such partnerships gradually evolved. How might an ancestral anemone-dwelling clownfish have co-evolved the vitally important cautionary approach of its youth and the equally critical gelatinous covering of its older self? Any 'half ready' evolutionary intermediate would have suffered a prompt demise. And how might ancestral weaver ants have evolved a response to the caterpillar's vibrations and scents as well as the ability to search for its milky secretions? As the authors' duly note:

"The weaver ants would have no concept of [the caterpillar's] existence; therefore, they would take no notice of the scent and sound signals emitted by it. And if they had accidentally bumped into each other in the forest, the ants would have ruthlessly torn the novel caterpillar apart. Thus, we can hardly consider their relationship the result of an evolutionary process" (p.53)

A scrumptious wrasse picking inside the mouth of the Goliath grouper is the image that best epitomizes the attack on the Darwinian edifice that Hornyanszky and Tasi lay out in the third chapter of their book. And what a well-orchestrated attack it has turned out to be.

For more information and to order Nature's IQ go to http://www.arn.org/arnproducts/php/book_show_item.php?id=129

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend sent me this item on the purely random evolution of the wiener dog (dachsund):

Our findings suggest that retrogenes may play a larger role in evolution than has been previously thought, especially as a source of diversity within species," said the study's first author, Heidi G. Parker, Ph.D. of NHGRI. "We were surprised to find that just one retrogene inserted at one point during the evolution of a species could yield such a dramatic physical trait that has been conserved over time."

In the past, retrogenes have been recognized as an important source of changes that have fueled the divergence of species. However, the dog findings are the first example of a retrogene that has spurred significant and long-lasting variation within a single species.

And it just happened to be conserved, too, by survival of the fittest. Amazing.

News flash!

Toronto (July 27, 2009) North of Lake Superior, Canadian wildlife biologists are reporting a dismaying reduction in wolf packs, with a few haggard, starving survivors haunting fast food dumpsters near riverside hunting lodges, in hopes of a stale donut or two.

Highly efficient wild packs of dachshunds have been attacking established timber wolf packs and seizing their moose kills.

Geez Freeple, a Toronto University-based wildlife biologist, explained, "Evolution bred the dachshunds to have short legs and weak jaws, so they never actually get anywhere near the kill until after the wolves have brought it down and opened it up. After that, it is an easy matter for the dachsunds to drive off the wolves. They just yap incessantly. Same principle as driving guests away from the dachshund owner's house. Of course, the wolves meekly surrender in just the same way as the house guest does and slink off.

"It continually amazes me that anyone doubts the power of unguided Darwinian evolution."

(Note: To avoid misunderstanding, this is not a serious post.

There are NO packs of wild dachshunds running loose in the boreal forests of Canada.

No Geez Freeple works at the University of Toronto.

No boreal wolf would see the dachshund as anything but about 2 kg of pleasant guts to devour, all the sweeter if it just had a meal of dog food.

And the yaps would cease pretty quickly too.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist

Speciation: If you don't sleep together, you soon won't cheep together?

Darwinism and popular culture: A columnist reminds me of its easy, empty phrases

Common descent, uncommon descent, and, hey, a ladderinto ...

Darwinism and popular culture: Well, aren't we all 30 per cent banana anyway?

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: "Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?" Winners announced

Darwinism and academic culture: Why so many scientists no longer believe Darwin

Darwinism and popular culture: Real biology vs. Darwinism

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

Synopsis Of The Third Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer
By Robert Deyes
ARN Corrspondent

ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7 Imprint: HarperOne

"Watson, with his wild hair and perfect willingness to throw off work for a Hedy Lamarr film, and Crick, a dapper and no longer especially young fellow who couldn't seem to close the deal on his dissertation"(p.59). These are the uninspiring words that Stephen Meyer uses to describe the two men who would ultimately unravel the structure of DNA and thus ring in the molecular biology revolution.

With the chemical composition of DNA sufficiently well established, the world of science appeared poised for a major shake-up in its understanding of heredity. Still, the road of discovery up until that time had been anything but a 'walk in the park'. While important details concerning the components of DNA had been ironed out as early as 1909, several erroneous turns at the beginning of the twentieth century had thrown biologists 'off piste' into thinking that protein and not DNA lay at the heart of heredity.

In the 1940s the pioneering work of Erwin Chargaff brought heredity firmly back into its rightful place. Having shown unequivocally that DNA was made up of non-equal proportions of its constituent bases, Chargaff recognized that DNA might possess a language-style code that could act as the medium for inheritance. The intellectual journey that led James Watson to Cambridge University's Cavendish Laboratory in 1951 eventually finished of course with a stunning confirmation of Chargaff's suspicions.

Key to both Watson's and Crick's triumphant entry into the DNA race was their uninhibited drive to ask questions even if that meant revealing their ignorance. While others feared tarnished reputations should they expose any gaping holes in their understanding of the matter at hand, Watson and Crick had little to lose in their rise from obscurity. The Watson-Crick duo took valiant stabs at the DNA structure problem using data that others, notably Rosalind Franklin and Linus Pauling, had amassed. Indeed history tells of the tensions that existed between these rivals although many considered Watson and Crick to be nothing more than laughable 'know nothings' who had no business being where they were.

Using little more than plastic and metal models Watson and Crick brought substance to the idea that a double helix with phosphate backbones running on the outside accorded best with the data. The 'staircase structure' that they ultimately arrived at was in all senses revolutionary as was the nine hundred word-long 1953 Nature paper they published just weeks later. Famously, Crick entered the Eagle pub just around the corner from the Cavendish laboratory to inform the masses that the 'secret of life' had at long last been found.

Meyer does a marvelous job in conveying the personal tensions that so characterized the DNA story. His extensive coverage of 'turning point' historical moments reveals an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter. Like few other scientific discoveries, that of the structure of DNA brought fundamental changes to our understanding of the chemistry of life since life itself could no longer be considered to be a mere product of matter and energy. As Meyer elaborates, information in the form of a DNA code had emerged as the critical player in defining the hereditary makeup of nature.

Synopsis Of The Second Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 978-0-06-147278-7 Imprint: HarperOne

When the 19th century chemist Friedrich Wohler synthesized urea in the lab using simple chemistry, he set in motion the ball that would ultimately knock down the then-pervasive 'Vitalistic' view of biology. Life's chemistry, rather than being bound by immaterial 'vital forces' could indeed by artificially made. While Charles Darwin offered little insight on how life originated, several key scientists would later jump on Wohler's 'Eureka'-style discovery through public proclamations of their own 'origin of life' theories. The ensuing materialist view was espoused by the likes of Ernst Haeckel and Rudolf Virchow who built their own theoretical suppositions on Wohler's triumph. Meyer summed up the logic of the day

"If organic matter could be formed in the laboratory by combining two inorganic chemical compounds then perhaps organic matter could have formed the same way in nature in the distant past" (p.40)

Darwin's theory generated the much-needed fodder to 'extend evolution backward' to the origin of life. It was believed that "chemicals could "morph" into cells, just as one species could "morph" into another" (p.43). Appealing to the apparent simplicity of the cell, late 19th century biologists assured the scientific establishment that they had a firm grasp of the 'facts'- cells were, in their eyes, nothing more than balls of protoplasmic soup. Haeckel and British scientist Thomas Huxley were the ones who set the protoplasmic theory in full swing. While the details expounded by each man differed somewhat, the underlying tone was the same- the essence of life was simple and thereby easily attainable through a basic set of chemical reactions.

Things changed in the 1890s. With the discovery of cellular enzymes the complexity of the cell's inner workings became all too apparent and a new theory that no longer relied on an overly simplistic protoplasm-style foundation, albeit one still bound by materialism, had to be devised. Several decades later, finding himself in the throws of a Marxist socio-political upheaval within his own country, Russian biologist Aleksandr Oparin became the man for the task.

Oparin developed a neat scheme of inter-related processes involving the extrusion of heavy metals from the earth's core and the accumulation of atmospheric reactive gases all of which, he claimed, could eventually lead to the making of life's building blocks- the amino acids. He extended his scenario further, appealing to Darwinian natural selection as a way through which functional proteins could progressively come into existence. But the 'tour de force' in Oparin's outline came in the shape of coacervates- small, fat-containing spheroids which, Oparin proposed, might model the formation of the first 'protocell'.

Oparin's neat scheme would in the 1940s and 1950s provide the impetus for a host of prebiotic synthesis experiments, most famous of which was that of Harold Urey and Stanley Miller who used a spark discharge apparatus to make the three amino acids- glycine, alpha-alanine and beta-alanine. With little more than a few gases (ammonia, methane and hydrogen), water, a closed container and an electrical spark Urey and Miller had seemingly provided the missing link for an evolutionary chain of events that now extended as far back as the dawn of life. And yet as Meyer concludes, the information revolution that followed the elucidation of the structure of DNA would eventually shake the underlying materialistic bedrock.

Meyer's historical overview of the key events that shaped origin-of-life biology is extremely readable and well illustrated. Both the style and the content of his discourse keep the reader focused on the ID thread of reasoning that he gradually develops throughout his book.

Synopsis Of The First Chapter Of Signature In The Cell by Stephen Meyer

ISBN: 9780061894206; ISBN10: 0061894206; Imprint: HarperOne

In August of 2004, philosopher Stephen Meyer published an article in the Proceedings Of The Biological Society Of Washington. The article raised media interest and outrage because it was the first to "advance the theory of intelligent design" in a peer-reviewed scientific journal. The editor Richard Sternberg lost his position as a result of the ensuing debacle.

Just a few months later, renowned British philosopher Antony Flew shocked the world by reversing his life-long atheistic commitment and announcing his support for an idea reminiscent of that proposed by the modern intelligent design movement. That same month the ACLU declared it would be filing charges against the Dover, Pennsylvania school board for approving the teaching of Intelligent Design in its science classes.

Much of the controversy in all the above cases stems from a misunderstanding over what the intelligent design movement does and does not purport to explain. As many in the movement have re-iterated throughout the years, intelligent design is not in any way synonymous with biblical creationism. In the words of Stephen Meyer "intelligent design is an inference from scientific evidence, not a deduction from religious authority" (p.8).

In his recent book Signature In The Cell, Meyer presents a fresh outlook on one of the most compeling facets of the Intelligent Design case- that of biological information in DNA. When Watson and Crick published their famous paper in 1958, they not only solved the mystery of the structure of DNA but also unearthed the computer program-like nature of the information that it carried. While experience tells us that such information has its origins in the activity of conscious beings, evolutionary biologists have dismissed such a connection in biology. As an alternative, they have as we all know placed their belief in the blind activity of natural selection.

It would seem ironic therefore that these same scientists would then employ design-evoking metaphors such as 'code' and 'language' to describe DNA. They of course qualify this by stating that the apparent design of DNA is merely illusionary. Still as Meyer hammers home, the mystery of the origins of DNA and life itself remains one that modern day biology is finding difficult to unravel.

Meyer provides a lucid and personal account of his own experiences as a scientist and philosopher revealing to the reader the watershed events that led to his move towards the intelligent design alternative. Foremost in his initial exposee are the meetings he conducted with Charles Thaxton who, in his co-authorship of the book The Mystery Of Life's Origin, rejuvenated the idea of intelligent causation in biology.

Uncommon Descent: Contest Question 7: "Foul anonymous Darwinist blogger exposed. Why so foul?" featured the opposite outcome from Contest Question 6. Only one person entered Question 6 (winner announced here , possibly because most of us are sick of hearing the term "crisis" used to mean any situation (in this case, genomics) that someone finds upsetting. That's good news, really. Maybe we'll go back to saving "crisis" for the next eruption of Krakatoa or Pinatubo. Basically, there are no "crises" in cosmology or genome mapping.

Anyway, 198 people responded to Contest Question 7. Now, to recap, the topic had come up unexpectedly. An avatar blogger, "Canadian Cynic," had been posting obscenities for years against Canadian women (wives, mothers, grandmothers, sisters, daughters) who espoused traditional values. I somehow got in his sights because of my interest in the intelligent design controversy.

The problem wasn't so much with the vile stuff he said but with the fact that no one knew who he was. But the enterprising Wendy Sullivan, the "Girl on the Right", found out, and allowed the world (his clients, colleagues, suppliers, acquaintances, neighbours, anyone who might be interested, really) to know that that is how he spends his time when he is not developing or writing about software.

That's all we wanted, really. Just to end the secrecy. The rest, we were pretty sure, would take care of itself. Okay, so that's history, but it raised an interesting question for Contest 7: Why do so many Darwinists spout so much filth, hostility, and aimless detraction?

In other words, why would stuff that earns applause at Panda's Thumb and After the Bar Closes get you kicked out of Uncommon Descent? And, incidentally, Darwin and his associates would doubtless be much more comfortable at Uncommon Descent than at Panda's Thumb or After the Bar Closes? What cultural change does this signify?

The part I find most interesting is that in polls, people like Canadian Cynic would doubtless proclaim themselves great defenders of the rights of women, more volubly maybe than men who would never behave that way in print.

Most of our 198 entries responded to one aspect or another of this charged issue., but a number were genuine entries. After reading them over and thinking about them, I found I could not choose between two entries, EndoplasmicMessenger at 105 and Cannuckian Yankee at 163, so I am declaring them joint winners. Both need to provide me with a postal address if they wish to receive their free copy of the Expelled DVD.

Here are their entries, reproduced:

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

A friend writes,

This weekend I watched Alien From Earth- a documentary that outlines the consternation that the 'Man of Flores' has caused amongst evolutionary anthropologists. Here is what Nature science editor Henry Gee had to say on the matter ('Evolution of the Gaps' is once again all too evident):

Despite decades of patient work we still know rather little about the evolution of humanity ... the remains we have are very scarce and very meager and that means that there are probably lots of different species that existed, lived for hundreds of thousands of years and then became extinct and we know nothing about them ... All you need is just one to completely blow apart your well entrenched comfortable idea of the linear progress of evolution.

Basically, it's not clear that the one-metre tall humans who occupied Indonesian island Flores for millennia lived any differently from other ancient humans, so the obsession with classifying them as a different species sounds like just that - an obsession.

See also:

Flores find a clear misfit for human evolution sequence?

The little lady of Flores files

First "hobbits" [an early name for Flores humans], now Pygmies?

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Top Ten mysteries in science 2007 (Golden oldie!)

Human evolution: We know little, and with good reason

Academics as conformists?: No, they just want to be non-conformists, like everybody else

David Tyler: Used to be horse feathers, but now it's dinosaur feathers?

David Tyler: Tetrapod family tree looks like a bush

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

In "Second Genesis: Life, but not as we know it," Bob Holmes (New Scientist, March 11, 2009) provides a summary of attempts to create artificial life (paywall).

We're still stuck with Life 1.0, the stuff that first quickened at least 3.5 billion years ago. There's been nothing new under the sun since then, as far as we know.

That looks likely to change. Around the world, several labs are drawing close to the threshold of a second genesis, an achievement that some would call one of the most profound scientific breakthroughs of all time.

However,

Venter's team at the J. Craig Venter Institute in Rockville, Maryland, plans to remove the genome from an existing bacterial cell and replace it with one of their own design. If successful, this will indeed result in a novel life form, but it is a far cry from the ultimate goal of a second genesis, as Venter would be the first to admit.

Other teams, however, are striving directly for that ultimate goal. The most ambitious of them do not even rely on the standard set of molecular parts, but seek to redesign a living system from first principles. If successful, they would provide an entirely new form ...

Meanwhile, others look for a shadow biosphere, an independent type of life sharing the planet with us.

My sense is that the people who use existing manufactured parts will have the best luck with their work.

Here's University of Colorado (Boulder) philosophy prof Carol Cleland'sargument in Astrobiology Magazine (12/01/06) for looking for a shadow biosphere:

The discovery of a shadow microbial biosphere would be philosophically and scientifically important. It is clear that familiar Earth life has a common origin, and hence represents a single example of life. Logically speaking, one cannot generalize on the basis of a single example. If we are to achieve a satisfactory understanding of the general nature of life, we need examples of unfamiliar forms of life.

Also, Holly Hight asks ("Does Earth harbour a shadow biosphere of alien life," Cosmos: The Science of Everything, 16 February, 2009 ):

Finding life that doesn't fit with the types we already know would be a strong indication that life developed more than one time here on Earth, increasing the chances of finding it elsewhere, said Paul Davies, an astrophysicist at Arizona State University in Tempe.

But nobody has ever seriously searched for microorganisms - or any form of life - different from the carbon-based, DNA-centred type of life about which we have long known.

If we do look, Davies said, "It's entirely feasible that we'll find a shadow biosphere," he told reporters at the annual meeting of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) in Chicago.

"Our search for life [has been] based on our assumptions of life as we know it. Weird life and normal life could be intermingled, and filtering out the things we understand about life as we know it from the things we don't understand is tricky."

It must be hard to write science fiction these days.

Also just up at Colliding Universes:

Cosmology: Crisis of the month - gravitation

You never know what'll turn up useful

Multiverse: Getting comfortable with a zillion of everything that is unique

Podcasts in the intelligent design controversy: Origin of life (with Charles Garner)

Origin of life: This time it's salt water

Colliding Universes is my blog on competing theories about our universe.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

The significant thing about this Scientific American podcast on the recent disfavour into which evolutionary psychology has fallen is that no one appears to be throwing a fit about it.

This looks like another one for the Top Ten Darwin and Design stories of the year. But basically, it makes sense. You can only sound like the "Relationships" section of the weekend paper for so long, while pretending to do some kind of science, before people who actually do some kind of science start to get a bit nervous about what they are expected to endorse.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Michael Bloomberg, check your messages. In "Weak Link: Fossil Darwinius Has Its 15 Minutes: Skepticism about a fossil cast as a missing link in human ancestry" (Scientific American, July 21, 2009), Kate Wong observes,

And in an elaborate public-relations campaign, in which the release of a Web site, a book and a documentary on the History Channel were timed to coincide with the publication of the scientific paper describing her in PLoS ONE, Ida's significance was described in no uncertain terms as the missing link between us humans and our primate kin. In news reports, team members called her "the eighth wonder of the world," "the Holy Grail," and "a Rosetta Stone."

The orchestration paid off, as Ida graced the front page of countless newspapers and made appearances on the morning (and evening) news programs. Gossip outlets, such as People and Gawker, took note of her, too. And Google incorporated her image into its logo on the main search page for a day.

And then it all just melted away, with SciAm being only the latest source to say, "Hey, wait a minute. Shut off the canned wonder track for a minute, will you?"

I will certainly propose for this overall story as a down-list item for the ten top Darwin and Design stories of the year (here is 2008's list). It's rare indeed that popular media actually revolt against a proposition in "evolution," even one as patently foolish as this one - but evidently it happens. And who knows? - raindrops seldom fall solo. More Wong:

Critics concur that Ida is an adapiform, but they dispute the alleged ties to anthropoids. Robert Martin of the Field Museum in Chicago charges that some of the traits used to align Ida with the anthropoids do not in fact support such a relationship. Fusion of the lower jaw, for instance, is not present in the earliest unequivocal anthropoids, suggesting that it was not an ancestral feature of this group. Moreover, the trait has arisen independently in several lineages of mammals—including some lemurs—through convergent evolution. Martin further notes that Ida also lacks a defining feature of the anthropoids: a bony wall at the back of the eye socket. “I am utterly convinced that Darwinius has nothing whatsoever to do with the origin of higher primates,” he declares.

The real story here is the desperate need for a secular materialist establishment to find icons of evolution to venerate, Bloomberg-style - and it won't be their fault if they don't get a bunch more bogus relics.

My instinct about what went wrong is this: Popular media consider themselves gatekeepers when it comes to creating a craze, and they resent scientists, like the Ida team, who usurp their time-honoured right. Hence their swift revenge.

Also just up at The Post-Darwinist:

Darwinism and pop culture: Attempts to pretend that Darwin did not extend his theory to human society

Francis Collins: The Good News guy faces tough questions now

Darwinism and popular culture: Attacking Collins hurts science, Chris Mooney argues

Uncommon Descent Contest 6 winner announced: Why waste a crisis, especially in genomics?

Extinction: A 62-million-yearitch?

Enforcement of Textbook Orthodoxy Annals: Xist Gene X-ed

So when is Harlequin going to come out with their Neanderthal romance series?

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

Here's my Mercator.Net story on Francis Collins as new NIH head:

President Obama has chosen an evangelical Christian as the new head of the National Institutes of Health. He is coming under fire from both sides of the culture wars.

[ ... ]

Of course, his advocacy of faith as a public scientist has received mixed reviews, to the point of attracting histrionics about looming "theocracy."

But now that Collins faces confirmation hearings before the Senate, the focus will shift from his persona to his view on issues relevant to his new job. He seems much more relaxed about abortion and human embryonic stem cell research than the average evangelical leader, so it will be interesting to see if he attracts any flak on that account.

Go here for more.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).

by Denyse O'Leary
ARN correspondent

This was the question:

Here's On the Epistemological Crisis in Genomics by Edward R Dougherty, which moved in Current Genomics, April 2008.

Abstract

There is an epistemological crisis in genomics. At issue is what constitutes scientific knowledge in genomic science, or systems biology in general. Does this crisis require a new perspective on knowledge heretofore absent from science or is it merely a matter of interpreting new scientific developments in an existing epistemological framework? This paper discusses the manner in which the experimental method, as developed and understood over recent centuries, leads naturally to a scientific epistemology grounded in an experimental-mathematical duality. It places genomics into this epistemological framework and examines the current situation in genomics. Meaning and the constitution of scientific knowledge are key concerns for genomics, and the nature of the epistemological crisis in genomics depends on how these are understood.

He kvetched,

The rules of the scientific game are not being followed. Given the historical empirical emphasis of biology and the large number of ingenious experiments that have moved the field, one might suspect that the major epistemological problems would lie with mathematics, but this is not the case. While there certainly needs to be more care paid to mathematical modeling, the major problem lies on the experimental side of the mathematical-experimental scientific duality. High-throughput technologies such as gene-expression microarrays have lead to the accumulation of massive amounts of data, orders of magnitude in excess to what has heretofore been conceivable. But the accumulation of data does not constitute science, nor does the a postiori rational analysis of data.

What's happened since? Another black hole?

Contest question, for a free copy of Expelled?: What rules of science are relevant for genomics. Are they being followed?

This one didn't attract a lot of entries and they were all from the same person. Principally, I suppose, that is because many people interested in genomics react to the "crisis" the way I reacted to a recent claim about a "crisis" in cosmology around gravity. To most of us, a crisis is when you lock yourself out of the house and see through the window that the dog has tipped the candlabra and set fire to the carpet. If you don't do something useful right this minute, you soon won't have a house or a dog.

Okay, and the winner is, by acclamation, Lock, for 2:

From Edward R Dougherty: "But the accumulation of data does not constitute science, nor does the a postiori rational analysis of data."

I assume he uses an a priori framework with which to make that judgement?

Of course he does. And rightly so. And that lens is the one science should be using (and does ... but not consistently).

Here is the insanity ... science uses this lens religiously, except that when doing so the evidence points to religious conclusions.

Denyse, you asked: "What rules of science are relevant for genomics?"

Available empirical data examined consistently through the lens of the 'law of non-contradiction'.

"Are they being followed?"

Really now ... is that question necessary?

While Lock says he already owns Expelled, it may make a handy gift item, so he needs to be in touch with me at oleary@sympatico.ca, to arrange shipment of his prize.

Toronto-based Canadian journalist Denyse O'Leary (www.designorchance.com) is the author of the multiple award-winning By Design or by Chance? (Augsburg Fortress 2004), an overview of the intelligent design controversy. She was named CBA Canada's Recommended Author of the Year in 2005 and is co-author, with Montreal neuroscientist Mario Beauregard, of The Spiritual Brain: A neuroscientist's case for the existence of the soul (Harper 2007).